


A Case Of You

by dorothy_notgale, Tromperie



Category: Good Omens (TV)
Genre: Alcohol, Booty Calls, Boundaries, Caught Feels, Communication, Drinking problems, Enemies With Benefits, Good Omens Big Bang, Long-term, Non-Chronological, Other, Playlist Available, Reconciliation, Sexual Relationship, Variable Genitalia, breakup-makeup
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-02-09
Updated: 2020-02-09
Packaged: 2021-02-28 06:53:59
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 4
Words: 23,958
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/22619680
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/dorothy_notgale/pseuds/dorothy_notgale, https://archiveofourown.org/users/Tromperie/pseuds/Tromperie
Summary: Just before our love got lost, you said "I am as constant as a northern star, " and I said "Constantly in the darkness. Where's that at? If you want me, I'll be in the bar."~Joni MitchellAziraphale and Crowley have been hooking up for a long, long time, with alcohol giving them the kind of plausible deniability that really only exists in the participants' own minds.But those two millennia of drunken, deniable "mistakes" came to an abrupt end in the 20th century, and Crowley never understood why. Now, though, heavy with the realization that he nearly lost Aziraphale forever—maybe it's time to find out.
Relationships: Aziraphale/Crowley (Good Omens)
Comments: 9
Kudos: 62
Collections: Good Omens Big Bang 2019





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

> Written for Good Omens Big Bang 2019! Soundtrack on [Spotify](https://open.spotify.com/playlist/7fM6wc48SJgIzi5jTBuf2A?si=zBbh2_dJTd6KNbI86TpdLw) by our amazing artist,  
> [somber_malachite](https://archiveofourown.org/users/somber_malachite)!

****

**2019 AD**

“Look, you don’t understand,” Crowley said after too long on the bus, London’s skyline looming. “I thought you were _dead!_ For _hours!”_

“I see.” Aziraphale cast his eyes down, the fine muscles in his face tightening momentarily but not pleasantly, somehow. Not—sympathetic. (Naturally; he was always so bad at that, just like the rest of his species. Crowley included, once upon a time.) The expression vanished in half a second, becoming smooth calm like a channel flipped inside his head. He smiled, tremulous and near gentle, and said, “I appreciate that you were concerned. I’ll try to be more considerate of your feelings until you get over it.”

“Angel.” Crowley reached out, daring to catch that familiar hand like it had never been his open prerogative before. The flutter under his touch made it feel more like the first time than the first time had. “I can’t _‘get over it.’_ You can’t just expect me to handle this.“ 

“I didn’t vanish on _purpose,_ Crowley. I—I wouldn’t do that.”

“I’m not blaming you, but.” He laced their fingers together, feeling the dirt and ash between them and somehow that was right. “Please. Just for tonight, before whatever happens happens, let me hold you. Nothing more, but I just need that so badly.”

Aziraphale looked frightened, even now, when nothing they did would be so much as a drop in the bucket of their misbehaviour. But even scared, Crowley’s angel (nobody else’s, surely, not now—though he hadn’t hurtled down, hadn’t screamed and burned and lost and that was sort of a blessing wasn’t it—) had some of that steely stuff in his spine, and he nodded shortly.

It took so _much_ effort for him to bend.

Crowley, on the other hand, was all sinew and curve, and the bit of shame he still owned wasn’t for _this_. For him it was the easiest thing in the world to twine around his long long love and absorb his radiant warmth.

“Tha—that’s good.” Even now the simple act of thanks stuck in his throat. Bloody hypocrite, him. “We need to plan.” 

“Of course.” Nobody could be a pragmatic bastard like Aziraphale. “I have one.” 

“Figured you would.” He couldn’t stop himself grinning, and the tension ebbed just a little. “The face thing?” 

“Precisely. While I was discorporated,” there was a brief chain reaction—Crowley flinched, Aziraphale’s lips thinned, a righteous little flicker hissed in the demon’s chest—before Aziraphale continued. “While I was traveling, I had a bit of time to think about the oversights of our respective… organizations.” Trying to sidestep, he’d wound up at the same point.

“Y’mean how they’re great bloody wankers who couldn’t see past the end of their own nose if you cut it off?” Crowley drawled. 

“I mean there’s a great deal less difference in our powers than we’ve been thinking.”

“Makes sense, doesn’t it? Nobody’s been able to tell the difference between us up there for centuries.”

“My point exactly.” The smile on Aziraphale’s face was small and spare, eyes half-lidded and distant. Crowley’s guts lurched, his heartstrings pulled one setting tighter on the rack. 

How had they gotten here, now, this great half-measure of holding one another tighter than they would ever be allowed but still not tight enough? Closing his eyes and knowing that Aziraphale would stay awake enough for the both of them, Crowley wished that he knew where he’d gone wrong. 

_It should have been easy._

_It used to be._

  
  


**~500 AD**

“Come on, angel.” Crowley’s eyes were just visible in glimpses, golden as the mead Aziraphale knew was sold in brimming jugs one crooked street over. “What could it possibly hurt, if we stop scoring points off one another for one night?”

Aziraphale pressed his lips together, wondering (not for the first time) just how little oversight Hell had over its foremost agent on Earth. Maybe _they_ wouldn’t care, or maybe once damned, well, how much more was there to lose?

Heaven could watch, he knew. He’d been told, long long ago when it hadn’t seemed to matter because when would he ever be doing anything questionable anyway—

“The efforts of evil are won by small concessions,” he sniffed, but he didn’t really feel it. His feet were sore, and the chainmail they had him gallivanting about in was chafing like mad, and bathing had apparently gone the way of Alexandria this century. As if to underline the point, something sharp gouged along the bottom of his foot. “Oh—bother!”

“Shame. I hear the bloke with the lute does amazing things with his hands—”

“Crowley!”

“What? Great massage.” The demon seemed honestly taken aback before the calculation ran in his head. “But by all means, tell me what _you_ were thinking.”

“You’re impossible.” The crowd around them was bustling; Aziraphale winced as he put his weight down. “...But perhaps I should sit down for a while.” 

Crowley’s grin was easy and unmissable in the crowd. “Follow my lead.” 

Five drinks did their magic on the aches of the road. Aziraphale settled happily back into his chair, taking a more appreciative sip of his mead. Crowley had vanished two drinks ago. It left a cold spot on the other side of the table; he frowned. 

Something lifted his foot, and he jumped. In effect, it looked almost like him falling out of his chair. 

“Easy.” Crowley was back, reclining like he’d never left and gesturing at the total stranger now in possession of Aziraphale’s extremity. “Told you, magic hands. Take care of the foot for you.” 

“Oh, erm,” he shifted, “that’s quite alright. It’s not—I’m feeling much better.” In a true testament to the Lord, it had healed miraculously as they crossed the threshold. He sent the young human away with a considerable tip and a request for a Visigoth number that hadn’t been sung in a century or more. Still, it found its way forth from the strings. 

“So.” Crowley looked loose, when he drank alcohol; his smile was quick and crooked, his limbs gangling. He wore no armor, here in town, and Aziraphale wondered vaguely what manner of sin he could be stirring up; it didn’t look like anything violent. Usually his hair would be—

Not usually. There wasn’t a _usually._

Aziraphale wouldn’t presume to know him, despite the times they had met over the past few millennia, but it did _seem_ that this was more like he’d been at the beginning, perched on the Wall or standing on an open plain.

(More than when he’d had his hair done up in awful little curls, eyes hidden and words bitter as hellebore—skin warm and almost glowing beneath richly dyed linen and blackest lambswool, warmer yet with that same drapery gone—this was why they shouldn’t drink.)

“So.” Aziraphale replied just to reply, when the silence had stretched too long and he sensed Crowley’s mounting need for something to bounce off of. To shake himself out of memories of that unrepeatable incident.

“Found any good places to eat lately? I remember you like that.” The Serpent of Eden’s lips looked smooth and pink against earthenware crockery as grey-brown as everything else in this town—like the only living thing anywhere, and even as he thought that Aziraphale knew it to be untrue.

This place teemed with life, with people and animals and colour aplenty, but he couldn’t seem to touch it.

Couldn’t feel it, except when this one being remembered a foolish detail about him from a foolish night five hundred years or more in the past, because who else _was_ to remember Aziraphale?

“Not really.” He looked into the hearth. “Hasn’t seemed to be much point, lately. Or maybe I’ve just lost my appetite.”

“Well, well.” Crowley’s dark russet brows inclined towards one another before his forehead smoothed out once more into mischief. “You’re in luck—it seems it’s my turn to do my job, if you’ll follow me back to my lodging.”

Aziraphale’s cup slipped from nerveless fingers, and would have hit the table had not the world stopped with it a fingerspan above the grooved wood. Crowley took it and set it carefully down, not a drop spilt, before frowning again.

“Or not. Only, I’ve ended up with some things I hadn’t planned to eat, and I thought—though I suppose I know why you’d distrust me.” And then he coiled back into himself, as though it were rude of Aziraphale to just. _Remember_ things that truly _had happened_ between them. As though he were _bothered_ by it.

It upset him a little to see his adversary laid low, which was likely unangelic of him. But then, God did have infinite compassion for all of Creation, and that must have included demons. He imagined trying that line on Gabriel and shuddered. “You seem to have no shortage of friends here.” It was so much easier to talk like this; words slipped free more easily with lubrication. 

Crowley waved it off. “They wouldn’t appreciate it.”

“I just don’t think,” he turned his cup around, considered the dew frozen on the sides, “after last time…”

“What, when I let you eat half my oysters? You’re welcome.” 

_Does he truly…_ that stung unexpectedly. He scolded himself for questioning a blessing. He’d spent a few decades expecting Crowley to hold _that_ over him before tentatively accepting that no blackmail was forthcoming, and here was his proof. 

“As I recall, you drank all of my wine,” he shot back. “If anything, _you’re_ the one in _my_ debt.”

“My lot, isn’t it? Wicked, unforgivable serpent.” Crowley drained his cup in one long swallow. “Not even Heaven’s own Earthly agent could take a crack at me.”

“Childish provocation has no effect on me,” Aziraphale said dryly. “But it would certainly be easier to help you if you made some effort.”

“Let me treat you then.” The room around them had started moving again; Crowley was clearly basking in his victory. “My place isn’t far.” 

Not that it would have mattered if it were. Aziraphale had nowhere to be.

Whatever Crowley was doing, it must be long-term; the place was fully a part of the city, a real building rather than a tent, and Crowley didn’t knock before entering. The straps of Aziraphale’s bag cut into his shoulders, physically painful reminders that he hadn’t yet found a new project or crisis or tragedy to insert himself into, and Heaven hadn’t seen fit—

Heaven _had_ seen fit, of late, to grant him more latitude. Less instruction, a slower report schedule, fewer meetings. Shows of confidence, clearly.

He groaned softly as he set it to the side, assuming Crowley to be busy lighting the fire and summoning some more-than-natural light to illuminate a weirdly barren room.

“You all right? What’ve you got in there, anyway, bricks to wall me off with?”

“Nothing important—just books. Human writings.” He downplayed it almost instinctively, the hundreds of hours of craft and effort hidden in his sack, carefully and unnaturally safe from the ravages of the elements. He could fit so, so much into his bag, and he could make it last the ages, even in this climate.

“Eeegh.” Crowley pulled a face and threw up a dramatic arm, wrist encircled by a silver bracelet shaped like himself. “Heavier than bricks, then. You should’ve let Oin at your back, not your feet.”

“It’s nothing.” The hearth was warm, the rushes on the floor clean as in no human home, and Aziraphale’s legs folded under him almost automatically. He put out a hand, feeling the heat of the flames and watching their reflections dance over his gold ring, that concentrated nugget where all his markings lived instead of flat to his skin like a normal angel’s.

He increasingly thought that perhaps he _wasn’t—_

Crowley was making rummaging sounds, worrisome considering that the goal in digging into that pile of baskets was supposedly edible food, but Aziraphale paid him little mind.

How close, he wondered, could he get to the fire, before the heat was too much?

“Here.” A wrapped loaf of bread intruded between him and the flames when they were a few finger-widths away; he had no choice but to take it, inhaling out of habit.

“Is that fennel? Or anise?” 

“Improves the flavor, they said.” Crowley shrugged.

“They don’t have this here.” He took a small, savoring bite. “I haven’t seen this since Egypt.” 

“Humans go all over the place these days, Aziraphale. Do you ever pay attention?” He followed the bread with a fragrant wine; peaches full and ripe as if they’d just been plucked from the tree; and baklava that was clearly barely cleaving together under the weight of honey and nuts. 

After months of unleavened loaves and cold meats, it might well have been manna[1]. “Just happened to have it, did you?” 

“I can throw it out, if you like.” 

Aziraphale yanked the bread away from Crowley’s reaching hand. “Wastefulness is a sin.”

They sat in silence, Crowley taking long drinks from a never-empty cup. Aziraphale finished the bread and brought a peach to his mouth. It was trembling-soft and quick to give under his teeth; juice filled his mouth and oozed over his fingers, a few drops escaping to drip down his chin. 

“Enjoying yourself?” Crowley leaned in to wipe the juice away with his fingers and fumbled, pressing most of his fingers over Aziraphale’s mouth instead. They were warm and earthy; lived in. 

Heaven had chided him not long ago for his indulgences, failing as he was to maintain his body at its initial created standard. The other angels kept their bodies cold; they passed among the crowds, but humans who looked too long tended to feel a quiet panic they couldn’t explain. 

_Be not afraid,_ and it was such a relief when someone wasn’t.

These things Crowley had saved were all sweet, but his hand carried flavors salt and savory, all sudden bursts of nourishment on Aziraphale’s tongue which yes, had escaped from the prison of his lips.

And oh, no, Crowley did look afraid, just slightly—just in the white around his eyes, the largeness of his slit pupils. Just in the way his breath caught.

“Yes,” Aziraphale said, his voice rising from deep down in his chest, his own hand wrapping around that wrist, that silvery bracelet, to keep it where he could taste because he had been starving for ages.

Crowley’s nails were slightly uneven but thin and sharp, almost like blades against his tongue, and the pads of each separate finger bore delicately-textured whorls that reminded him of tree rings or Wootz steel; the other angels’ palms were smooth as ice, not that Aziraphale touched them.

“Angel…” Crowley breathed heavily, balancing on some precipice, and then they tipped or Aziraphale pushed them. “Oh, Hell.”

They were knee-to-bony-knee in the rushes, and Crowley was tasting those leavings of wine and last season’s infernally preserved peach juice from the corners of Aziraphale’s mouth, and the hearth was hot against their sides.

Second times were more awkward than firsts, the strangeness of a foreign body masked by bold, false familiarity. Memories insisted that a hand at the nape of Crowley’s neck would send a shiver down his back and draw him closer—but now he pulled back, muscles strung tight. 

“Should I—”

“Let me—”

“Ow!”

It lacked utterly in divinity; they slouched slowly sideways, bursting into nervous laughter when they hit the ground, and Aziraphale felt himself inching a little more into the skin he’d been allocated. His soft, dimpled knees tangled—not naturally but purposefully—with Crowley’s barely-covered bones. His still-sticky fingers tore away the sturdy linen and wool in human fashion. How, after all, could one effect one miracle when they were already in the midst of another?

There was a pleasant, sleepy haze around Aziraphale’s thoughts, warming him up to plummy notions about God’s creatures and the relative merits thereof. The versatility of snake tongues was high on the list. Neither of them had bothered forming particulars beneath their clothes and so the shivers they traded back and forth hummed throughout their whole selves, both privately delicious and anxiously without outlet. 

“You all right?” Crowley asked when their mouths unsealed for a moment, breath smoky and hands pressing wonderfully firm to the flesh over Aziraphale’s ribs. “I didn’t mean—well, maybe I did but. The wine.”

“The wine, yes. It—does that.” Aziraphale nodded, accepting the rush to his head, the way his body took his instruction, but at a delay. Accepting the excuse. Everything felt heavy and physical and _good,_ here in the meat Heaven wouldn’t want him to understand, and he wasn’t alone in it. “How are you?”

“Me?” Confusion crossed Crowley’s face then, as Aziraphale stroked his fiery hair, disarranging the complicated mass of braids twined through one another so that every time his head turned, it caught the light differently.

The hair beneath his arms was curlier, darker, the same color as his eyebrows and lashes, but it was soft and it carried scents of salt and sulphur and something tangy and animal, and he shuddered when Aziraphale touched there.

“You, Crowley. I want to know.” The demon gasped then, perhaps in startlement when Aziraphale put his lips to the slight concavity at the center of chest, perhaps for some other reason lost to time—but his claws were so careful not to break skin when he rolled them both over and took the upper hand.

“Dangerous stuff, asking for knowledge. Might get you kicked out.” After all the effort spent to put them here, Crowley now seemed determined to look anywhere but at Aziraphale’s face. It was offensive, frankly. 

“We already know good from evil.” He caught Crowley’s pointed chin and turned his face, gentle but unyielding. “You’re stalling.” 

“Iyuhhhh,” the demon’s brain seemed suddenly in absence, the flush of alcoholic on his cheeks almost as hot as the fire. “Good. S’good. Do what you want.” 

“What I…” The words struck him between the ribs, sending roots deep through his faculties. They colored the room, such that when he looked down he found his opposite number transformed. Here was no longer a body but a constellation of possibility: the jump of his pulse under a probing tongue, still warm with heat and sticky with sweat; the hollow of Crowley’s belly, exposed, that when touched sent an unexpected squirm of laughter through him and a corresponding jolt in Aziraphale’s chest; the insides of Crowley’s thighs clenched reflexively at the slightest touch and smoothed, clenched and smoothed, as if fighting the desire to run or trap him closer. 

Mesmerized, he put his mouth there, and bit. 

“Fuck!” Crowley jumped hard enough to leave Aziraphale’s nose and eyebrow stinging, and the kettle which had been hanging over the fire rolled clattering off into the corner with a comet’s tail of sparks following. “What the—shit, shit, did I hurt—”

“It’s fine, it’s—” Aziraphale gestured vaguely at what had almost been a conflagration in the rushes. “I’m fine, just let me—”

“Here, let me check your face—” Crowley tried turning Aziraphale towards the fire, rings tangling in Aziraphale’s hair.

“Ouch!”

And in the midst of all that, their eyes met. Crowley looked half-frantic as he tried to free his hand from Aziraphale’s head, and it was all so awful that Aziraphale couldn’t help it.

He giggled.

Just a small one at first, helpless, and he felt bad because what if it hurt Crowley’s feelings, but then.

Crowley looked _completely different_ when he threw back his head and laughed.

The furrows in his brow and worried creases at the corners of his lips smoothed; the light of the fire was nothing next to the warm glow Crowley himself seemed to exude, as if stars shone just under his skin. 

_I wonder if this was how he looked_. It was the first time Aziraphale’d really thought of Before since coming to Earth. The pain in his leg was a barely-remembered dream in his corporeal form, and all the ugly memories were shelved with it. Better to think of angels as divinely Good and demons as wickedly Bad and have done; seal off the time when the whole of his purpose had been at the tip of a blade. 

He knew, they all did, that demons were Fallen. But it was bandied about with such venom that it had lost its meaning; no one really thought about it [2]. And now…

“Let me at least fix your hair. Come here.” Several of the braids had come undone, and others had frizzed beyond helping. Angelic powers had no direct effect on demons and vice versa, so miracling it was out of the question. Instead, Aziraphale drew Crowley into the vee of his legs and began to undo the complex knots, combing out each section with his fingers as he went. 

“Not exactly what I was thinking of for this evening,” Crowley mumbled.

“So you admit it.” Aziraphale tapped the back of Crowley’s head scoldingly, the wine still warm in his belly. “You did a poor showing of temptation for a demon, my dear.”

“Worked, didn’t it?” As sweet and open as that fleeting carefree look had been, there was something wonderfully true to the twist of a smirk seen in three-quarters profile. “Got you right where I wanted you tonight.”

“Did you now?” Aziraphale hummed a little as he worked at a tangle. “I hadn’t realized you were angling for someone to dress your hair.”

Crowley’s shoulders moved soundlessly, like a sigh had gone missing in the aether.

_(Picking through the glistening plaits, Aziraphale tried not to think too deeply on how it felt to be touching like this. Smoothing, cleaning, setting all to rights—it was good that he kept his hair cropped short. Nothing to fuss with there, no need for another’s assistance. Nothing to remind him of Heaven.)_

“This was easier the first time,” Crowley said softly, and then that wealth of copper tugged free as he threw back his head to take an enormous drink from the jug of wine spiced with nothing from this region. His throat worked, bones and muscle appearing to jump under skin.

“It shouldn’t have been,” Aziraphale closed his eyes, though the fire’s light made a hot orange wash on his eyelids regardless. Crowley’s temple felt damp, as everything here was damp, the skin almost tacky against his lips, the tails of hair above his ears soft. “And it—it shouldn’t be happening again.”

“No. You’re right.” Crowley’s arm had a long reach, stretched awkwardly back over Aziraphale’s shoulder keeping them chest-to-back. “Can’t happen after this. Mistake.”

The hearts they were given just for show thudded in time as Aziraphale’s head fell forward, his tongue flicking out to dab the dregs from Crowley’s lips. “Human bodies are troublesome, aren’t they?” he whispered. “Makes it difficult to think.” 

“Mmm. Comes from blending in. Creatures of instinct.” They were so near that each word Crowley spoke sparked a new meeting of lips; but the demon himself made no move beyond that. “Should we?”

“No. We shouldn’t.” And then Aziraphale pressed him back down to the floor, pressing wet, open kisses to his throat and chest. Their clothes were obligingly fully absent, shuffled aside in what could hardly be called divine or demonic intervention. 

“We haven’t put anything on.” Crowley looked meaningfully toward his waist. 

“Those peaches you kept were marvelous,” Aziraphale said, all the more primly for having his teeth round Crowley’s nipple. “It’s terribly undignified, but there is a certain appeal to the mess running down one’s chin.” 

“Hngk.” 

“Are you alright? You’re very red.” Aziraphale smiled. Butter, had Crowley thought to bring it, wouldn’t have melted in this being’s mouth. 

“YEeah no, good, great, no problems here.” The barest look of concentration passed over his face. “Ask and ye shall receive.” He spread his legs without a hint of shame, untainted by the burdensome rhetoric that had been weighing the world down since Eve passed out of the garden. Now at the join of his legs was a soft thatch of curling red hair, the folds beneath flushed and damp. 

Aziraphale hmmmed softly to himself, crawling forward on what was quite suddenly a soft and well-beaten rag rug. Crowley’s parts quivered before he even touched, when he just ran a finger along that lovely crease between thigh and pelvis, and it was silly to feel personally flattered by that mechanical response. Bodies were bodies, after all.

“Goodness, Crowley.” He parted the hair gingerly, enjoying its springy feel as he brushed it to each side. “This is a pretty thing, isn’t it?”

He slipped his index and middle finger up and in before Crowley could answer; the element of surprise seemed key to maintaining some semblance of quiet here.

(And then Crowley _did_ answer, but not in any language known to sentient beings.)

Aziraphale kept it simple at first, doing what he knew worked on himself, but the angle was so different, and the reactions so much more satisfying that he quickly realized there was no comparison. Just hot, slippery, frilled flesh around his hand, fingers going wrinkled and thumb near cramping from the effort of rubbing that tiny hooded nub, and all this before he even—

“Well, then, don’t torture me,” Crowley growled, pulling _hard_ at what little hair Aziraphale had. His eyes were molten. “Do what you said.”

“Of course, of course. So sorry.” And yet he felt freer, at last, because Crowley had _asked_ for this, for his tongue and his mouth, his breaths huffed quickly between dives down into that tangy-salt crevice where the skin was already overworked into bruise-tender swollen softness, the hole loose and open to his every lick and suck.

Words seemed to desert Crowley utterly, but his body offered its own rewards. Aziraphale knew he had done well when a buck of hips thrust him unexpectedly deeper, burying his nose in fragrant musk; the thighs clamped tight over his ears trembled, bare heels against his back seemingly trying to draw him in closer. How fortunate that breathing was an aesthetic for their kind—it let him devote himself fully to exploration. At last Crowley froze tight as a bowstring and let out a little keening noise, fluttering and pulsing against Aziraphale’s tongue. The angel sighed into the warm space, content in some small and unexpected way. 

The wetness of their mixed fluids felt cool on his chin as he drew reluctantly back, head swimming. He caught Crowley’s eye (pupils blown near-round, but watching) before dabbing himself delicately clean. 

Drunk on more than the wine, Crowley rolled onto his stomach and crawled closer, pawing at Aziraphale’s ribs. “Here—lemme—” 

“There’s no need to worry about that.” He guided Crowley’s head down to his smooth, featureless lap, and began to stroke his hair.

“There is. If we can’t do this again, I want us both to finish.”

Aziraphale looked away at that _if,_ because it couldn’t be more than a mistake. A bad one, made twice in five centuries, but. Nothing more.

But Crowley couldn’t be ignored, after all. His hands were cool and dry, a match to his lips as he traced patterns of tiny kisses along Aziraphale’s belly and hips.

“Please?”

When Crowley climbed up to straddle Aziraphale’s waist, he let his head fall back and surrendered to the inevitable, manifesting something that had Crowley gasping in seconds because it was already hot and hard and _right there._

“Wicked, angel.” He smirked down, and Aziraphale had trouble keeping his eyes open as he looked up at his glow. Too bright, too—too much, clenching around him, strong long thighs working, narrow hips flexing.

“Crowley,” he said too softly, too much affected by all this nonsense, and how could his counterpart be so _good_ to him in the worst way?

“Like that?” He was moving too frantically, the near miss of each small separation stirring unexpected anxiety in Aziraphale’s chest. Without thinking he caught Crowley around the waist, pressing him down until his soft, wet curls were flush against the soft, heavy curve of Aziraphale’s belly. A tremor echoed back and forth between them as they held there, his cock squeezed by wet, encompassing heat below; each spasmodic jerk of his hips pushed Crowley’s tongue further into his mouth, nearly down his throat, as if whatever mad impulse had possessed them would end only with their bodies snugly fit one inside the other. 

He breathed Crowley’s name again, rocking them both now with slow, deliberate purpose, their chests flush and their cries only as loud as they dared. Each thrust reminded him that the earth was not moving, the Heavens not shaken; when he came, his body shuddering into shapelessness with no seed or trace left behind, the only stars that fell were behind his eyes.

Crowley’s breath was warm on his neck and trying not to shake. Poor dear. He wanted to lay them both down, still pressed skin to skin, and stroke that copper hair until it rose to form the dawn. It was—

Tempting. 

Instead, when Crowley tried to nuzzle closer, Aziraphale pushed him gently away. “Here now, the wine’s gone to your head.” 

“I’ll go to your head,” the demon grumbled, pushing against his hand.

_Too late for that_ . Aziraphale reached quickly for the abandoned jug of wine. “Thank you for the meal. It was—well, not _divine_ , I suppose,” he flicked his eyes upward at the pointed emphasis, “but lovely.”

Crowley seemed to take the hint then, curling his arms around his knees instead and saying something about the weather, the Empire, the harvest.

A few hours later they dressed on opposite sides of the room and went their separate ways; it was too easy not to see one another for a day, a week, a decade. And to drink, when they did meet, a great deal more.

* * *

[1] This is a decided understatement; manna, being Heavenly in nature, would eventually serve as the divine inspiration for complimentary buffets associated with motivational seminars and was unsatisfying in a similarly nebulous way

[2] In point of fact, angels are incapable of thinking at length of a demon’s angelic corporation; if put to it, their minds will begin to move irresistibly of other tasks they had forgotten, or embarrassing arguments they had lost, or—in a pinch—the most _excellent_ petty comeback that would have been useful some hours before


	2. Chapter 2

**2008 AD**

“I owe you one,” Crowley said, and he hated the weakness of the washed-out phrase, hated his own weakness trying to play on something that wasn’t there anymore.

But Aziraphale paused, looked over, and relented, and they were on their way to the Ritz directly.

_ (It wasn’t all that rare. They’d been in, what, two years ago? Three? He wanted it not to be that rare.) _

He drove, which he liked because it gave him control. He’d used to regret that he had to keep his eyes nominally on the road, but now he liked that, too.

The world was ending, and it scared him a little to look at the angel he loved so and see the gulf stretching further.

He owed Aziraphale from far more recently than ‘93, he thought, watching at a remove as Aziraphale savored the summer menu. Crowley owed him from 1941, from 1768—that had been lovely, getting bent over and seen to roughly and furtively in the back of a carriage—a kiss on the wrist in 1850, a brave smile as a tower fell and language fractured inside the mind of every corporeal being on the planet. He owed him a thousand little kindnesses over the centuries, and had been forbidden and then forbade himself to pay any of them back as he most wanted.

But the world was ending, and he’d always been one to mix business with pleasure, regardless.

And Aziraphale looked so good when he enjoyed his body, no matter how.

—

_ Cancel each other out. _ He’d known that would prove a killing blow to the argument, if only he got the chance to make it. Sure enough, the cogs turned in Aziraphale’s head, and the bargain was struck. They’d need to get together again to work out the details. The closest they’d been in over a decade, aside from brief and furtive meetings.

Not that that was why—he had to believe he wasn’t that foolish, disrupting the End Plans just for  _ that _ .

It had become a game, unspoken, to see just how close he could get to their former habits without crossing the line. (The alcohol helped.) The only downside he could see was the hope. That nasty little word got a lot of trade in Heaven, and it was cribbing from their playbook that had earned Crowley every commendation he’d actually worked for. Lotteries, the DVLA, passing lanes a bit too narrow to actually squeeze through—hope was nothing but a sweet poison that left you bleeding in the aftermath.

_ You deserve this _ , he’d think at the humans in his darkest moments.  _ Don’t even know how good you’ve got it. You have short lives blissfully ignorant of bloody Plans and ineffability and you spend them trying to figure out how to torture each other; you don’t even have to. So enjoy, you nasty bastards _ . It was in those moments that he knew, whatever Aziraphale said to convince himself, that he had deserved to Fall. 

He didn’t have it in him to be good, not in all the ways that mattered. But, well, someone had to be. And here was Aziraphale, just prepared to accept this business about the Apocalypse, just pack it all up and _ leave _ him. Leave everything. And since the god-not-damned angel wasn’t going to do it, Crowley had to pick up the slack. Because someone had to care that the seas were going to boil, that all the creatures that hadn’t asked for this were going to get caught up the same as humanity. That it was bloody  _ unfair _ , and that the fact Aziraphale usually cared about that sort of thing was one of the reasons Crowley had fallen in love with him.

_ And if the world ends _ , he thought underneath it all, selfish and loathsome and damned as he was,  _ how will I have enough time to get you back? _

He hated that thought, because he  _ did _ have Aziraphale as much as any being short of God ever would. (That worried him, sometimes. The isolation.) It shouldn’t matter whether they had sex; hell, they’d gone longer than 65 years between assignations before, plenty of times.

Yet he wanted that part of their interactions back terribly, now that he couldn’t have it. Every kiss and cry and touch he’d missed out on  _ taunted _ him, logic be damned, especially since he knew Aziraphale wanted it too.

The torments of Hades were—well, definitely worse than watching an angel sit on a couch getting steadily and deliberately soused. But Crowley still fancied it a tough call distinguished largely by the company involved.

“Are you sure it’s a good idea?” A few drops sloshed from from Aziraphale’s glass.

“Look, it’s perfect. Family like that’s not going to pay any attention to the domestics.” He stalked over to the couch so he could brandish the advert more effectively. “We’ll have access, nobody’ll look twice.”

“Not that. I know we can do that.” 

“I’ll take the nanny job, obviously. Unless you fancy wiping bottoms and playing pat-a-cake and whatever the baaaaaby needs.” He said it just to see the little shudder Aziraphale tried to suppress. Familiar affection bloomed in his chest. 

“I think I’d best take the gardner job.” Aziraphale resettled himself primly, somewhat ruining the effect when he turned his focus to very, very slowly bring his glass safely to his mouth. 

“Ah, right. You can ‘round my flat and give me some tips.” As if he’d let the angel near his plants. They’d start getting ideas above their station. 

Aziraphale’s expression turned waspish. “Well, why don’t you find a way to split in half then. Do it yourself.” 

It was a sour note on the keyboard, and they both flinched. How had they had time to forget this dance? It hadn’t been so long, not in the scheme of things. And yet they seemed to be constantly stepping on one another’s toes these days.

“You really think it’s a good idea to put  _ me _ in charge of redeeming the Antichrist? All alone?” He’d taken off his glasses sometime earlier; the whole room felt full of light because of it, but he realized too late how stupid he must look trying to peer judgmentally over rims that weren’t there.

Aziraphale frowned, brow crumpling up like paper, and the wine was obviously loosening his tongue and addling his brains because

“You’re good at it, Crowley. Being good, I mean.”

There was no truth in wine. Crowley had been the one to spread that lie around more years ago than he could easily recall.

“Shut up.” He waved his hand and told himself he had  _ much _ more coordination remaining. “M’not. I’m just deceptive. V’fooled you. Sin.”

“Do my job as well as I ever could.” Aziraphale was staring down into a glass of red, face slack and a little distant, and Crowley wondered how much he could possibly mean that.

“Can do it as  _ much. _ Not as well.”

“Is there really any need to posture? If things are really—I mean if the Plan says this is the end, then we haven’t long to see each other. Once Heaven takes the win, I can’t imagine it will be… well.” He didn’t even sound enthused.

Crowley did something he’d almost never done then, over their two millennia of long drunken evenings: he took Aziraphale’s glass. Then he leaned in close. “We don’t have much time. If we’re to have any hope of doing this, I need you with me. And… for Hell’s sake, we’re going to have to be sober about it. Your side’s not exactly going to take me in.”

“You want me to defy Heaven, but you can’t admit that you might be a less than ideal demon?” 

“Doesn’t matter. There’s one big line, and once you cross that it doesn’t matter if you spend every day helping little old ladies cross at Picadilly. That’s facts.” They were too sober for this conversation, both of them hurtling into the sun.

“You don’t know that.” 

“You ever heard of a demon popping back up to Heaven jusssssst for a little chat?” The silence was self-evident. “Me either. And who says I want to be forgiven, eh? Least my side doesn’t go around drowning whole cities and calling it divine justice.” 

“Wrath.” 

“Oh, that makes it much better. They all loved that rainbow, did they; really livened up the corpses?” This was why they drank. They needed the grease to slide them past all the jagged edges of the centuries, keep Aziraphale from remembering some petty misdeed decades past and Crowley from sneering out of habit. 

“I’m not trying to fight you, Crowley.” Aziraphale’s voice was too soft, and Crowley frowned and held the tip of his own tongue between his front teeth. Assessing.

Waiting.

“I don’t mean to. It’s just.” Aziraphale looked  _ sad, _ of a sudden, sad and tired and almost  _ old _ , but he kept trying to start whatever sentence would clarify things enough for them both to ignore the issue for a few years longer. “I don’t like to fight you, and I’m not trying. But I can’t just accept the things you believe without thinking them through. I have to  _ think _ sometimes, just—just for myself.”

Crowley wondered, sometimes, what the Heaven Aziraphale’s reports looked like, if they didn’t involve  _ thinking _ ; Crowley’s were nothing but argument, after all.

“When’s the last time you heard from them, anyway?”

“Today.”

_ Fuck. _ There was no stammering to give it away; one of them must have actually worn a body for the  _ occasion. _

“Before that, though. Five years?”

“...Bit over seven.” Aziraphale set his glass down, the liquid gently and unceasingly sloshing from side to side like waves in a particularly Homeric sea. “They give me a great deal of latitude, these days.”

What the fuck was the point of that—what did Heaven even—Crowley was getting sidetracked, and meanwhile the level of liquid rose along the sides of its little prison as the curvature turned its movement from waves to a tiny maelstrom, pulling down towards the stem.

“And you’ll use that latitude, won’t you?” he asked, staring past that disturbance to the angel’s correspondingly smooth features.

“Yes.”

“Okay, that’s…” Crowley ran his hands through his hair. “Good. That’s good. One less thing.” 

“And yours?” 

“Haven’t noticed me since the one about the M25.” Small-minded, all of them. A very alien feeling stirred in his chest. “We might be able to do this. You and me.” 

“There’s no guarantee they won’t change their minds. Now that it—now that things are different.” Aziraphale was getting skittish again, but Crowley wouldn’t let him pull back now. He could see the small, sinful longing on that familiar face.

He went, half-stumbling with the memory of drink, to kneel beside Aziraphale’s chair. “I always thought it’d be us. In the end. They’re dull bastards, the rest of them. Haven’t the sense to survive when it comes down to it. Couldn’t find an idea if you stuck it up their arse.” 

“They are a bit stiff, aren’t they.” The mutinous corners of Aziraphale’s lips were twitching. 

“Let’s just say I had a bit of inspiration when inventing the corset.” 

“Yes, I remember.” The tips of well-kept fingertips traced the back of his hand. “‘There has to be a way to make being bent over the furniture unpleasant,’ I believe your words were. That was the time we—”

“Alright, yeah! I remember.” All the flush that should’ve been on the angel’s face had migrated onto the demon’s. Their hands were still touching. 

And then Aziraphale’s face shifted minutely—just a tiny blurring of the lines he’d had since time began, a rearrangement of features both incomprehensible and obvious, like everything else about him—and their hands were not, as though they never had.

“I’m sorry, my dear. I—I didn’t mean to.”

“Didn’t mean to what?” He played dim well, mostly because Aziraphale so often left him feeling so. Not with intent, but simply because Crowley knew him so well and still so little after so long.

And perhaps there  _ was _ a little demon cruelty in himself, trying to force Aziraphale to say it.

“Didn’t mean to… remind you. Of.” His lower lip sucked in slightly, nibbled by teeth that weren’t Crowley’s, damn it. 

_ Of two thousand years of touching and holding and confirmation, somehow, that they weren’t each alone. That they were alone together, if nothing else. _

He waited, coiled, knowing that he must look ready to strike.

“Of.”

The moment stretched, and on the table that glass rattled though not a drop spilled; it wouldn’t dare. Crowley could sense a precipice, and knew that he had the power to  _ push _ and get an answer—get a reason why—send Aziraphale over—

“Of—”

“Never mind.” He buried his face in the side of the angel’s soft thigh instead, ceding the moment and holding on to what he might possibly still be excused in the depths of a drunk. “Don’t answer me. I’m not making any sense.”

“You make more sense than I do,” Aziraphale said gently, gentle as the fingers that crept along Crowley’s hairline with the furtive care of a third-rate pickpocket. “I’m sorry that I. I just.”

“It’s not important, angel,” he said into hundred-year-old tweed, tightening his arms just a little around that comforting bulk without looking up. Not yet.

“There are…” picking through the minefield of words, “a great many things that we should talk about. When all this is settled.” 

He was radiating that same tension he had in ‘67, moving the goalposts as though that would be enough to keep Crowley alive and the two of them bound together. Then again, they’d just come from the Ritz. 

“But not yet,” he finished, somewhat petulantly.

“Not yet,” Aziraphale echoed. 

“You’re a blessed sight braver than me, saying there’ll be a ‘yet.’” He let himself look up into that face, bathed in warm lamplight and almost as radiant as the constant corresponding ache that housed in every demon’s chest. “They’ll execute us, if they find out.” 

“Then we take care not to get caught.” Aziraphale smiled with the same slightly guilty glee he wore whenever he was looking forward to doing something impossibly foolish, and Crowley’s heart gave in and liquified. _ Yes, later. Let’s pretend _ . They’d both been prepared to lie to themselves and each other until the ending of the world, and that wasn’t very long to wait now at all. “Besides, surely it’s you who believe we can do this.”

Crowley didn’t feel the stroke of a warm thumb down his cheekbone, but the ghost of it was there. Once upon a time he’d have tasted a gold ring in the corner of his mouth, conductive tang like a live wire.

“I’m a demon,” he said, pressing down on the aged cushions, preparing to lever himself up and away. “Don’t go accusing me of faith.”

“Well  _ one _ of us needs it,” Aziraphale said with a half-measure of solemnity. “And I’ve got too much proof.”

_ Have you? _ Crowley wondered.  _ Have you really, after so long? _ Crowley remembered the shape of his old faith, the texture of it held tight and torn free. He couldn’t have Fallen if he hadn’t believed, just… not in what he was meant to. In spite of himself.

It was so easy to fall, because faith made the clouds feel solid.

Sky blue ringing round an abyss—

Crowley looked away first, shook his head and hid behind the long loose hair that fell forward, because his eyes were out. Because they didn’t get naked these days, and he was the one who’d forgotten that again.

“As long as I can trust you,” he said, trying to be cool as James Bond with some sexpot from the other side, knowing he was just opening himself up for another insult.

“I’ll stop you, same as I always have. You can rely on that.”  _ Weaselly bastard _ . “Both of our sides will be none the wiser and we… we can go on as we always have.” He cupped Crowley’s face in his hands, soft as acid.

“We can’t. You’re fooling yourself.” He made himself pull back, pull away, pull out a fresh pair of shades from the air. It felt better to be armored, a muddy tint coming down between him and that radiant gaze. “But we can worry about that later, yeah?” 

“We should rendezvous before, so that we know how to find each other.” It was practical, but Crowley’d been around long enough to hear the hesitance in his voice.

“Where’s the fun in that?” He rolled his eyes at the scowl that earned him. “You’ll know me, Aziraphale. Just look for the most devastatingly sinful creature on the property.”

“From what I’ve read that isn’t likely to narrow the field at all.” Aziraphale’s most twisted in distaste. “He’s quite the ‘piece of work,’ as the Americans say.”

“I’ll have to aim for simmering repressed sex, then,” Crowley deadpanned.

“Mm, that might work. The call is rather lascivious, isn’t it.” His face was completely flat.

Sense told him not to bite. He glanced at the ad he’d pulled up earlier in the evening, which was formatted to allow for as few words as a dollar could stretch. No mention of unusual positions nor even a tawdry 69 tucked into the pay scale. “...you’re full of it.” Temptation was  _ his business _ , dammit. 

They razzed one another for a bit with the comfortable familiarity of  _ ex _ -lovers, and it if it wasn’t what he wanted, at least it was closer than he’d had in seventy-five years of unexplained rejection. And then he slipped out into the misty night, gone before morning as he’d always done.

Funny, for that to be the bit that didn’t change.

  
  


**1941 AD**

Each dip in the shrapnel-pitted road sent a jolt through the Bentley and a corresponding jump through the books in Aziraphale’s lap; it was proving a welcome distraction, if an inconsistent one. 

_ I love him _ , Aziraphale thought as Crowley tipped his hat back from his eyes in a way he likely thought was a suave cover for the lingering bedhead peeking out from the back. 

_ I love him, and he’s alive _ , he thought as they clipped a purse-snatcher, leaving him miraculously alive but conveniently prone.

_ I love him, and he’s alive, and he’s sitting next to me _ , he winced, watching Crowley grimace each time his foot connected with the gas pedal. 

Oh no.

Aziraphale was fond of love. Angels were beings of love, of course, and quite predisposed to kindness and understanding for all of God’s creatures [3]. And beyond that, he’d collected many books and scrolls on the subject, nudged a few yearning hearts together that needed a bit of an assist[4]. And he knew well the quote dear William had penned, about love and the relative ease of its path. But nothing he’d read had felt like this. 

At the moment, a selection of tiny needles were currently in the process of crawling out from his chest scrape by infinitesimal scrape, his ears were ringing (though that might have been residue from the shells), and his head was filled with a fog that registered Crowley was speaking but could not repeat a single word he’d said. 

_ I love him _ , his thoughts giddily insisted. 

His brain responded with a staticked screech. 

It had been seventy-nine years since he had had this, this chance to be close to Crowley, smell his musky earthen scent and see the moonlight on his skin.

(Part of their route was in a blackout, but those magical eyes had never been disadvantaged by darkness, and so they glided through with headlamps as dead as the streetlights above them.)

“This is a lovely automobile,” Aziraphale said at last, running his hand over the interior fixtures. He rarely had occasion to ride in them, as public transit was such a blessing. But there was something about  _ this _ vehicle that fit Crowley, from its swooping lines to the fact that there wasn’t a horse in sight.

“Thanks. Got it last year.” Crowley seemed to tighten up after that admission, peering searchingly at the street-signs instead of looking Aziraphale’s way.

“Last year? But surely this is an older style.”

“S’used. Wasn’t—around, when it first came out. You know.” He shook his head vaguely, making a right turn into utter blackness.

“I see.” Aziraphale didn’t, of course, but for tonight he chose not to push, nor to question this miracle in curse’s clothing. “I—I still have the shop. If you wanted to drop me off.”

“I know. Or—or I have my flat in Mayfair.”

The invitation was as unmistakable as the precious, unnecessary grain of tension in Crowley’s voice, as though Aziraphale might somehow  _ not _ tag along after that entrance. That rescue.

His chest squeezed again. He was suddenly quite aware of all the things that made a human body function, and how noisy it all was—the inflating lungs too short of breath, the blood now rushing in his ears, the gurgle of a stomach tied in knots. 

“I suppose it is rather late to be going all the way to Soho.” His voice sounded small and meek, not by deliberate design but because confidence, or even the confident pretense of weakness, was beyond him now. 

“Right,” was all Crowley said, the rest of the ride passing in relative silence until the glided into port near a sharply modern-looking building. It was untouched by the Blitz, conspicuously tall and unblemished despite what an obvious target it must have made. 

The car had stopped, and Crowley came round to open the passenger door. Aziraphale stared up at him, temporarily unsure of what a door was, or where they were, or the physics behind bipedal locomotion. It seemed completely possible that if he moved the great eye of Heaven would pierce him through, burning him up from the newly named love in his heart outward. 

_ Crowley’s holding the door open for me _ , his brain babbled.  _ That’s very polite. Demons aren’t polite.  _

“We haven’t got all night,” the polite demon in question prodded. He extended a hand sardonically. “Carry your books?”

“These are  _ first editions _ ,” he said out of habit, as though Crowley would take the little leather strap and toss the lot into the Thames. The books he’d just saved, without Aziraphale even asking, because he knew what mattered to Aziraphale and could be so terribly thoughtful and really quite kind when he thought no one was looking and—

“Angel!” Crowley was scowling a few inches from his face. The mix of musk and nearby warmth was heady as spirits. “I’m going in without you.” 

“I’m coming. You’re awfully impatient for someone who showed up several decades late to our last rendezvous.”

“Yes, well.” Crowley’s mouth pursed, and Aziraphale very much hoped that he wasn’t to regret that attempt at humour. But instead of restarting that argument out in the emptiness that should be public, Crowley reached out and handed him down as from a carriage, and Aziraphale let him—there was something charming in not being the antiquated one, just for a moment.

He felt so wonderfully ladylike.

And then Crowley turned, satchel in hand, and took a step, and of all beings Aziraphale knew what a hidden limp looked like.

“My dear! Oh, your poor feet!” He couldn’t have resisted his heart’s command then, not for anything—Crowley’s arm around his shoulders  _ fit, _ and it wasn’t as though the demon weighed anything at all.

“It’s fine. Let me go.” But Aziraphale could see the faint pink flush beneath the large glasses[5], telling him that the protest was half-hearted at best and quite safe to ignore.

Crowley could be so fragile, comparatively speaking. Just a little consecration, a splash of water blessed by even  _ human _ rituals, and he would be hurt past his corporation’s bounds.

“Now dear, would you really deny me the opportunity to see to my savior’s magnificent battle wounds?”

“Come off it.” The flush had spread across his cheekbones, revealing a few freckles dusted just over the nose. 

“I insist.”

True to his word, he kept Crowley in his grip until they were safely inside the apartment, the locked door coming obligingly open to his touch without the keys for which Crowley was fumbling.

“You should be careful, you know,” he scolded. He was rewarded with an undignified squawk as he deposited Crowley in what seemed to be the apartment’s only chair, a high-backed monstrosity that looked hard and unyielding as a church pew. A disapproving glare convinced it to soften a little, and by the time Aziraphale had found bandages and cool water Crowley was sinking into a cushion with the grip strength of quicksand. 

“You’re doing this on purpose,” Crowley hissed.

“Hold still.” He grabbed one flailing ankle to assess the damages. “Oh, Crowley.” 

While Aziraphale bought his clothes and maintained them carefully, cherishing the care and craft of human workmanship, Crowley tended to manifest his garments on the fly. As a result, he had an easier time changing looks on a whim but was virtually naked in all the most important ways. 

Even plain leather soles would’ve put a layer between the consecrated ground and the damaged flesh at Aziraphale’s fingertips. The polish-shine black surface was there and it wasn’t, giving way to sleek black scales in odd places, and those scales cracked and flaked all along the insole. 

_ If he hadn’t come to save me… _ The unspeakable mourning of a world slightly to the left of where they sat now crashed into him anew, a world where Crowley was ashen goo, even worse than being shredded and crushed by shrapnel (that killed slow, but it wasn’t  _ forever _ .) Aziraphale saw burns, fluid-filled shiny sacs like the mustard had made twenty-five years past—He pressed his forehead to the top of Crowley’s foot. “How did you know where I was?”

“I’m just that good.” Beat. “At what I do. Which is being evil, obviously.” He sighed, hat vanishing to make room for running a hand over his pain-creased forehead, and then said, “Look, before you go all… Maundy Thursday on me, you mind fetching something for the pain?”

“Of course!” Aziraphale jumped up, off-balance, and caught himself on the too-sharp edge of an enormous granite table. “Of course. Do you have morphine, or—”

“Gin, in the cabinet over there. Under the wireless.”

“Ah.” He didn’t ask where it came from, because surely Crowley was working the black market. Aziraphale was, too; people needed their little comforts, and their little vices, and the lines there were fuzzy as ever. He’d gotten good at it.

He poured two glasses, and when Crowley knocked his back in one go and motioned for another it made Aziraphale feel like a cowboy in a film, about to tend to his pardner’s gunshot wound.

Their eyes didn’t meet, and Aziraphale didn’t know how to ask whether this meant what it had before; he just knelt again and set to it, brushing his fingers as gently as possible over the flaking-away bits of scale, then cupping the (unholy, unhallowed, safe as can be) water in his hands and still hearing the hisses of pain as it cascaded over smooth black planes and occasional inflamed redness.

It could be—it could be worse, but.

_ “There’s not even a guard—” _

The spirits burned his throat. The smoke was in his eyes, surely.

His dipped back into the bowl for more, palms looking like a little font—

_ Don’t _ . His hands trembled, spattering (harmless, Earthly) water onto the floor.  _ Don’t think. Don’t pray. Just—just _ don’t. 

“There is nothing either good or bad, but thinking makes it so.” His voice was hoarse, run ragged by the exertion of his thoughts, and barely above a whisper. “I told William that line was a load of tosh, I think.” 

Crowley barked a laugh.

“But I—really, I thought you would have liked it.” How often had he found himself thinking on what Crowley might like, or how he would react to some joke; how often had he longed to turn and regale a constant companion in black with some small complaint? “I wish you would’ve stayed.”

“I’d have stayed. If you asked.” Crowley was looking down at him, through him; Aziraphale couldn’t meet his gaze, even through the glasses.

“You might’ve said so.” He swallowed, soaking a cloth. His hands were steadier with it, soaking and gently debriding the damaged skin. 

“I don’t even have to tell you why that’s stupid.” Crowley’s words winched tight, strung across the pain he was trying to hide. 

“Hold still.” His thoughts couldn’t seem to stop, now hurtling through a constellation of connected thoughts.  _ There's rue for you, and here's some for me. We may call it herb of grace o' Sundays. You can’t bless a demon. Angels can’t. And God… God…  _

He couldn’t ask about that. And he hadn’t prayed since the incident with the sword. Oh, he encouraged it in humans, of course; to give them hope. A sense of guidance to sort themselves out, even if Heaven wouldn’t be bothered to answer. The phone switchboard had not been so much their invention as divine replication, the endless wait that might possibly end in reassurance. 

“Gentle, will you!” Crowley jerked back in the chair, squirming away from the cloth. “Are you an angel or what? You sent me down a lousy one!” (That last shouted up to the ceiling.)

Who needed to pray, when Crowley spoke so fearlessly? If his voice went unanswered, there was no hope for any other.

_ Nymph, in thy orisons, be all my sins remembered _ .

He took another drink, and thank—somebody—that Crowley’s demonic nature rendered him safe from infection, because Aziraphale hadn’t the heart to pour alcohol over skin so abused by blessings.

He took another drink, and ran his hands up Crowley’s long thighs in their flashy trousers that weren’t quite any material known to humanity, because they didn’t really exist, like so many things didn’t—but this did.

The love Aziraphale felt, that was real. And so was something else, something hot and raw in his chest, but he couldn’t look at it now. That was for the morning.

“I’m sorry,” he said, and leaned up. 

More than three-quarters of a century out of practice but they still matched like this, though their tongues had been numbed by juniper.

(The ginr had been different, the last time. Tawny, softer, but this new London Dry harshness matched this new world.)

“Forgive me,” he said into Crowley’s mouth, and Crowley looked somehow stricken when he pulled back, left the glasses on and shook his head.

His hair was falling, red waves disarrayed without the hat to hold them in place.

“I was only teasing, Aziraphale. You all right?”

And he couldn’t, he couldn’t say  _ I thought you were dead, _ or  _ I thought you were finished with me—I thought I’d broken it, I thought that I would have to do this war alone just like the last, _ because they didn’t do that. They didn’t discuss, because to discuss was to acknowledge  _ this _ as more than a series of drunken blunders they kept falling into.

“You’re hurt,” he said instead, too little to contain his meaning, but how was he to begin to express himself with Crowley wearing an expensive-looking suit and slouching in a  _ throne _ above him?

“It’s nothing, angel.” But Crowley knew him, at least somewhat—better than anyone else, despite all their differences, and so even if he didn’t understand  _ why _ Aziraphale was so overwrought, he still knew to cup his cheeks and flick away his buff-colored hat, wave away the basin and pull him up off his heels. “I would’ve stayed. It’s just—my pride, you know. Sinning.”

“I would have asked. Oh, I hate to see you in pain.”

“I know,” Crowley flashed him a roguish smile. “That’s why I’ve got so good at hiding it.” 

That couldn’t have struck truer to the heart if he tried, and it must’ve shown.

“Kidding,” Crowley said again, even though they both knew he hadn’t been. “You sure you’re all right?”

He wanted to melt into another kiss, take them both to the floor and stay there. But Crowley’s feet were still raw and in need of tending, and in his state of mind he was likely to strip skin from bone with a careless blessing. Each tripped the other up in his thoughts, keeping him from making progress on either. 

“You’d gone,” he repeated foolishly, staring at Crowley’s lips. 

“Now I’m back.” The words were simple and slow, as if for a child. “I think the bomb might’ve grazed you, are you losing your touch? I—”

Aziraphale could feel the moment slipping away; that thought pushed him out of the crossroads, full-barrel into an embrace that sought to make up for all the time spent unaware of its importance. Fingertips, wrist, face, neck, his chest with silky shirt between them—he kissed each part of Crowley as he could reach it, afraid he hadn’t imbued his actions with sufficient meaning, and afraid that it could be snatched away in another instant.

“I hope not, but you’ll have to give us both a chance to find out.” 

Crowley’s face was unreadable, but the tips of his ears flamed as red as the shorn hair that revealed them. But sure enough, by the time his hand made it down into Crowley’s lap there was something there to touch.

“Have I ever really told you how much I appreciate your heroics?” 

“Erk.”

Aziraphale looked up steadily, hoping that he was managing some kind of eye contact as he sank back down in the gap between Crowley’s legs. The trousers hung him up momentarily, fastened as they were with a modern zip, but he managed without having to break his stare. And after that, all was familiar, warm and oddly comforting in his hand.

“Shall I lie in your lap?”

“If you’re going to start talking about country matters, I’ll need to start over.” Small, charming beads of sweat dotted Crowley’s upper lip.

“You did see it!” he beamed. 

It must’ve been a demonic trick that Crowley could hold so much blood above and still have any left below. “Could hardly help it, could I? Had my work cut out, making anyone come to see that downer.” 

“You’re such a dear.” Any fool, in the proper position, would’ve felt the throbbing jump Crowley’s arousal made then, and Aziraphale was no fool. The ache in his heart was suddenly too great for his chest, and came spilling out his mouth. 

“You try terribly hard to hide it, I know. But you can’t hide it from me. All those beautiful poems.” He paired each deserved praise with a gentle, petting stroke. 

“Spreading lusssstful thoughts,” Crowley gasped. 

“Those young people you helped—”

“I split up the marriage!” his head thunked against the chair, back arched.

“—into the arms of their true loves. You’re a terrible romantic. And those lovely intimate gatherings.”

“You,” he was panting now, fully hard even from just the lightest touch. “You’re about to tell me the lovely charm of molly houses, are you? All the drugs and stabbings?”

“Coyness isn’t your strength, dear.” He let his grip fall away, privately enjoying the way Crowley’s thighs trembled, the way his hips thrust and tried to follow after. He rewarded him by tracing a single finger up the underside of his friend’s cock. “You are a demon, of course. Not a lamb. But I sometimes think…”

“Husshhh!” Crowley’s knuckles were white, the ropy tendons in the backs of his hands flexing as he gripped the arms of the chair, gold leaf probably flaking into every hill and valley of his palms to sparkle and give the lie to his status.

_ (It was still there, underneath—so much the same, except for how Crowley could be harmed. How Crowley could  _ act. _ Aziraphale imagined a splash of gold at the temple, not nearly as full of character as the tiny black snake but lacking the pain of the Fall.) _

“Very well.” He showed pity then, or indulged himself—whichever. Take care with the skin Crowley had at the moment, lips over teeth, and it was like learning to ride a velocipede[6]. No matter how long, one never forgot. One couldn’t, not in the darkest times nor the light of day; the memory would come upon one all unawares. Or maybe that was just him, but.

The skin over the shaft was soft as silk against his lips despite the hardness beneath, and his nostrils filled with the scent of cloves and a distinctly reptilian muskiness. Thick and bitter on his tongue, those first few drops, like fernet. He swallowed and slipped down, then back up, and Crowley gave out a sound, a groan that petered off into a whimper.

_ Intoxicating. _ Aziraphale couldn’t unhinge his jaw and had no specialized tongue, but his own human-shaped one would do; it rippled, making long-practiced circles and careful occasional dips inside the hood as he rocked up and down. 

The bare floor hurt his knees, but wouldn’t dirty his clothing. Crowley kept an unnaturally clean house, always. Clean, sharp, just like the demon himself: a blade’s edge. Aziraphale had seen Houdini spit razor blades and needles on string, had learned how to hold sharpness within the soft tissues of his mouth.

They pricked, sometimes, but not dangerously. A little cut was no impediment to the effect.

He gently palmed the testicles below his chin, feeling them already tight and drawn-up with need, and it made him moan, too, through his nose as he kept sucking.

“Angel—angel—” Crowley sounded like a man dying of thirst, voice husky and cracking, and Aziraphale could  _ feel _ his free hand clenching too hard on Crowley’s hip as he, as they say, went to town. “Angel, oh, fffffffff—”

So sweet, so  _ sweet, _ one hand barely hovering, barely petting Aziraphale’s hair and brushing the nape of his neck when delicious bitter seedless fluid spilled down his throat and left a warm diabolic glow in his chest.

“Guh.”

“Mmm,” Aziraphale agreed, a purr in his throat as he nuzzled against Crowley’s thigh. “You do keep yourself wound tight.”

“That’s rich coming from you. ‘Oh pip pip Your Majesty, it’s so very duckie to have tea and crumpets on this fuh-hine afternoon; perchance have you thought of using a touch fewer African bones to decorate your drawing room?’” He fluttered a still boneless, blissful hand to his mouth. “They’ll name you the angel of British decency next.”

“Looking like this?” Aziraphale made sure to draw himself up very slowly, a few drops of mingled semen and saliva dripping down to his open collar—he could clean it, but the reminder would always be there. He lifted his face with eyes lidded, curls mussed and cheeks still pink from the pleasure of wringing such satisfaction. “It would be a bit of a scandal, don’t you think?”

In full, willing ignorance of human limitations, Crowley’s flagging erection had revived itself. 

“Some angel. You look like the cat with the canary.” His brows knit, as if a grievous error had only just come to his attention. “Why the Heaven are you still dressed?”

Crowley’s eye was magnetized to his barely parted collar, and Aziraphale said a small blessing for the lovely professionals of countless intimate salons who’d lived on the philosophy that what one couldn’t see was the more tantalizing by far. For once, however, his carelessness truly was just that—absentminded. 

“I thought I might like to take care of you.” It was terrifying even to shape the words, to be so thoroughly naked even in a full suit of clothes. His chest was aching again, the mix of love and chemical intoxication and grain alcohol all but ready to combust. “For being so kind.” 

“Don’t. Don’t let me fool you, Aziraphale.” Crowley grasped him by the upper arms and pulled, and Aziraphale let him. He was nearly to his feet when—

“Oh.” His head swam with a wave of dizziness, whether from the gin or the shells or the shock of all he was letting himself feel tonight, who knew? “Oh.”

What mattered was that he wobbled forward, caught himself on the ornamented chair-back with red velvet against his fingertips. The red and the gold reminded him of things, things he’d buried like they would have buried the dead in Heaven had bodies been invented yet. Like those he’d buried in Ypres and Verdun and the Somme. Blood on his sword. His bayonet.

His hands.

_ (His hands were still wet, could still kill.) _

He focused on Crowley instead, on that face he’d known as long as he’d known anything on Earth.

“Steady.” Crowley ducked his head, tilted it, all serpentine flexibility used to peer up at him with what the eyebrows showed as concern. “Let me help—”

“No!” Aziraphale dropped one hand to Crowley’s buttoned-up wrist, pressing it back down to the arm rest. “Don’t stand. You shouldn’t have to right now.”

He snuck one furtive knee onto the chair’s seat, instead, balancing on that and the toes of the other foot. He felt suspended, like gravity wasn’t holding him down despite his body.

“I can take it off if you want me to. But this, just this—I’m not counting.” He searched himself for words, for a way to say what he meant. “Next time—”

“We count everything. And there’s no next time.” The glasses were so obtrusive, great mirrored walls between them. 

“Well. Yes, of course. But—”

“You wanted it that way.” Crowley’s fingers curled into the soft flesh of his hip. “‘Can’t be too careful.’”

“I—” A great lump was blocking his throat, corking the burn of alcohol. He was right, of course.  _ What were you thinking _ , Aziraphale scolded himself.  _ That Heaven and Hell would suddenly put things right because you realized that this is _ precisely  _ what it looks like?  _ They’d put him right, and an aching old war wound would seem a pleasant diversion when they did. 

And Crowley…

_ My lot do not send rude notes _ . 

He was going to get them both killed, carrying on like this. Acting like a lovesick child, convinced things would be easy simply because he wished it so. Acting like Crowley would even want that, after all this time.

“I should go.” He tried to back away, to walk; another wave of dizziness caught him instead. 

Crowley’s arms were deceptively strong—thin and angular at a glance, but they held Aziraphale up now as if he didn’t weigh a thing.  _ How dashing _ , Aziraphale wanted to tease, but words had been stoppered up with the great storm building in his guts.

“Sober up. I’m taking you home.” 

“No, you’re not.” He poured all the alcohol back out of himself with a shudder. And then it was time to put on his brave face, the one he so often took off for Crowley; it felt hellishly familiar. Felt like it fit, which it never had. “You’re hurt, dear. You’re going to stay in tonight, especially because I don’t need a chaperone at the moment.”

“Dressed like that? You’ll glow in the night!”

It was kind of him, Aziraphale thought, to show such concern. He was always kind and always  _ aware _ . 

Just because Aziraphale had forgotten himself and fallen, that didn’t mean anything at all had changed for Crowley. Nor should it. One of them needed that perspective, the kind of safe distance that would let him just vanish and return without a care. It was good, Aziraphale told himself; it was safer.

Nothing good or bad, but thinking… He made it so.

He laughed and brushed a hand through Crowley’s hair, setting it to rights and coming away with a film of pomade making shiny his nails shiny and sticky his skin.

“I can change, if I must. And imagine: when you got me back to the shop, why, then it would be far too dangerous for me to let you out all alone and injured, and so I’d have to take you back here, and round and round and round we’d go until daybreak. It will be much easier if you just let me put you in your bed now.”

He could see the wheels turning in Crowley’s head, the fact of Aziraphale’s sobriety crossing out every possible joke that the demon would like to tell about joining him. They didn’t make this  _ mistake _ without help from a bottle.

“Rather stay on the sofa, actually.”

“Whatever you like, then.” And pride was a sin, but he did enjoy startling Crowley with an arm beneath his knees and one behind his shoulders. He weighed nothing at all, really, for a being his height.

Crowley made his complaints, posturing to no one, but only for a moment. Then his face turned to the space over Aziraphale’s mockup of a heart. The words he mumbled then were crushed into the material, strangled before they could live. 

Like the chair before it, Aziraphale convinced the couch to soften and stretch. They extended each other the courtesy of obliviousness—Crowley as Aziraphale slowed his steps, prolonging the short walk between rooms and lingering as he tucked blankets around long limbs; him as Crowley’s face turned toward his palm. Things that could be incidental, accidental. How absurd that they both pretended; if anyone were truly watching, this would damn them as much as if they were found naked and entwined. But they couldn’t change what they were, could they?

He’d never heard of an angel Falling since the war. Now that there was an organized opposition, full up, he assumed that any new traitors were simply taken care of rather than risk them carrying intel to the other side. And he’d never heard of a demon being forgiven. 

But then, he’d never met a demon like Crowley, either. 

“Sleep, dear.” He kissed the demon’s forehead. “You can owe me one.”

No, they didn’t make promises. They didn’t acknowledge. But if it meant he saw Crowley again before another eighty years had passed, he’d take the risk. 

And in his chest, a coal burned, painful and hidden.

* * *

[3] Though an angel could not be blamed if several of God’s creations, cursed and blessed with free will, pushed this natural beneficence to its limits; say, when shopping

[4] Crowley called this “being a bloody nuisance,” as though some third of these occasions hadn’t been when Aziraphale was acting under the Arrangement 

[5] Sometimes it seemed like they got bigger every decade, just to hide more of Crowley away from him personally

[6] Not, crucially, like actually _riding_ a velocipede, which has far more in common with the maneuver known as Reverse Cowgirl


	3. Chapter 3

**1995 AD**

When Crowley’s pager went off at a quarter past midnight, he was busy cycling through five different sockpuppet accounts to push misinformation about the Millennium Glitch and post on both sides of a Joel vs Mike fight on alt.tv.mst3k.

An easy Friday night, more or less, but not fully idle[7].

Which was why he felt such unease when the hunk of plastic he wore as an accessory to look cool, connected, or like a drug dealer (depending on the observer’s personal biases) vibed and threatened to fall off his glass desk onto the clear mat below.

He knew the number it showed, of course, but the fact that he was seeing it made him—nervous.

Three decades wasn’t much when compared to 6000-odd years, but it was plenty for uneasy human estrangement to creep in and settle on his chest. He and Aziraphale hadn’t met in months; hadn’t talked for more than a handful of minutes at a time in years, and any calls that did get made were from Crowley’s end. Somehow, ever since Aziraphale had handed over that ugly tartan Thermos, their relationship had actually morphed into what they’d been calling it—a business arrangement and nothing more. 

He looked down at the little screen, figuring Aziraphale wouldn’t know how to send anything beyond his number[8]. It was fortunate that Crowley wasn’t much of a gambler[9]; he’d have lost his shirt on the little 121 that scrolled across the display. 

_ Might still _ , he mused out of old demonic habit. Entendres were angelic—better to imply than to state outright—but demons had perfected them.  _ As if _ . 

He hefted the giant brick he kept at his side to his ear. It knew better than to ask him to dial. When the other end picked up (three rings, three times too long, something isn’t right), he made his voice chill. “What broke?”

The silence on the other end was long, but finally he heard a little inhale and— “You called back.”

Aziraphale sounded  _ surprised. _ It shouldn’t sting.

“Well yeah,”  _ angel, _ “’course I called back. You need something?”

“I—I thought you might be busy.” Aziraphale stammered the way he always did for a few days following contact from Heaven; Crowley ran some dates in his head, wondering if he’d forgotten this decade’s check-in, before he recalled that The Enemy had gone for a meeting-by-meeting non-schedule sometime in the 20s while he was sleeping. “Sorry to have. Bothered you. You didn’t have to—”

“Spit it  _ out _ ,” he growled, he hoped not too unkindly, already halfway down the hall with a peacoat manifesting itself over his turtleneck and slacks. “I’m free at the moment, bored even. Nothing on television.”

“Well those fifty-seven channels  _ were _ your idea, m’dear.”

Crowley hissed, electing to take the stairs (which found themselves temporarily quite a few flights shorter than normal) rather than chance the elevator’s Faraday Cage-like clutches blocking his signal.

“I stand by Home Shopping.”

“And for my part, I’m quite pleased with the History Channel. Humans, especially Americans, need to be reminded of the world wars as many times a day as possible.”

Crowley stalked over to the Bentley and got in, shutting the door quietly and proceeding out onto the streets. Switching over, he tucked the phone into the crease of shoulder below his right ear in hopes of frightening other motorists with the graphic evidence of just how little attention he paid to their safety.

“Ah-huh. And a worthy thing it is, too. Incorruptible.”

“Well you don’t have to be like—like that.”

_ Shit shit shit. _ He drummed his fingertips on the wheel and considered taking the sidewalk to get around a particularly decrepit Geo. Their rhythms were all off, these days.

“Like  _ what?” _

“I’m well aware that nothing is. Immune. To corruption.” There was a wet noise hidden in the crackle of the network, and in the pause that followed Crowley checked his battery life. Still good.

“Aziraphale…” He sighed, pulling up to the curb. The shop was closed, of course, but a light burned upstairs. “Look, just let me in and you can tell me what’s bothering you, all right?”

“Let you in?” He could see the sudden start from the shadowy shape at the service counter, just  _ knew _ that part of the seconds-long delay that followed was Aziraphale untangling the phone cord from around his index and ring fingers. “You’re—oh, goodness, you’re here.”

“Modern technology,” he said dryly before hanging up with a half-satisfying beep.

Generally speaking, Crowley was not the sort of being who knocked. He strolled in the direction of doors and they opened[10]. Aziraphale was, as ever, the exception. He rapped twice with his knuckles, pushing his Ray-Bans up with his free hand. Footsteps announced the arrival of the being on the other side of the door, followed by several minutes of quiet, dithering scratches as fingers brushed and released the handle several times. 

“Any time, angel,” he projected, gathering a look or two from the brightly festooned clubbers heading around the corner. “I could be getting cold out here.” 

A full minute later the door came open. Crowley tried to keep his eyes roving as he strolled in, lest Aziraphale change his mind and call the whole thing off. His tongue ran nervously over his lips, and that’s when he caught it: 

Alcohol. 

Aziraphale was absolutely sauced, and he hadn’t even waited for Crowley before getting started.

“All right?” he asked, his gaze locked firmly on a far shelf that seemed to contain both esoteric works of poetry and histories of the garment industry. 

“Of course, of course. Very vigilant. No frivolous miracles. I only thought—well, perhaps you’d like a drink. For the bottle you got me in ‘42.”

Aziraphale’s voice was the kind of music they could’ve never kept in Heaven. It battered at his resolve, at the lump that had constricted tighter in his chest for years and years; he was in danger of letting himself imagine things.  _ Look. You need to look at him _ . It would shake him out of dangerous hope. 

He looked. He let himself be caught by pale eyes glittering with millennia of barely contained thoughts and lips that trained themselves not to smile at the wrong things. He lingered on the flush high in those soft, round cheeks and across the snub tip of the nose, the worry lines beaten back but waiting to resurface. His hand reached halfway to the bottle Aziraphale was suddenly proffering, the linchpin in his guts dangerously close to slipping free.

Their fingers brushed, through none of his own doing, and it wasn’t his fault he flinched. It had been fifty years, but he would know the most careless of those touches anywhere.

The bottle was lighter than it should be if the angel had been drinking alone, and with no glass on offer Crowley did what he shouldn’t, wrapped his fist around the neck and lifted it to his too-wide-open mouth in the most conscious of signs.

Expensive stuff, but he only noticed the burn and the cloy, the way it obligingly coated his lips and left them wet and shiny as if he’d brought his Bonne Bell lipgloss.

(Strong stuff—Aziraphale didn’t usually go in for that, but who the Hell actually knew what he went in for these days. Not Crowley, though he was getting an idea from every shallow breath in the dead-quiet shop.)

“You got any music to listen to? Or a telly?”

“You said there’s nothing on.” But Aziraphale walked towards the back, leaving Crowley to lock the door. His gait was uneven, almost a limp, and Crowley wanted to reach out and steady it. Wanted to tell him to cut back, but it wasn’t his business, wasn’t as though it made a difference anyway.

Alcohol couldn’t hurt them.

He took another swig and looked around, noting the phonograph and the radio that looked the same as ever, as well as the blocky little Zenith that was probably new twenty-five years ago. Hadn’t seen it before, and wasn’t that something.

It was nearly one now, so he didn’t bother trying to turn it on. Just walked over to see what albums Aziraphale had on offer.

How had they filled the silence, back before recordings?

The crack of an ice tray, the clink of glasses, came from behind him as he browsed. He itched between his shoulder blades, a sensation like being watched.

“I didn’t think you’d come,” Aziraphale said as he handed over a chilled and freshly full glass.

“Yeah, well,” he shrugged one shoulder. “Nothing on.” 

“Ah.” 

They sipped in silence, the bottle never empty and their chests never full. 

“...Have you heard anything from your lot?” he asked at last, because the silence was going to kill him. His hand lingered on a dusty recording of young men long dead, men Aziraphale had doubtless known if he was bothering to keep them around. Ah, to be as lucky as a knick-knack, forgotten but at least near.

“Michael is very keen on the concept of corporate retreats.” Aziraphale snorted, disturbing the ripples of his liquor. “It rather fell to pieces when they realized the only place to retreat to was Earth.”

“Lucky break for us though, eh?” He realized his mistake too late, and tried unsuccessfully to swallow his tongue as though it might bring it back into line. 

“It would be terribly dangerous for you to have them here,” Aziraphale frowned. “You might have to leave London.”

“Wouldn’t make much difference for you, would it?” Because now they were in it, properly poking at the bruise until it bled. “More places you could go without the humiliating prospect of seeing a demon, I s’pose.” 

“Don’t be childish. I was only suggesting—”

“Oh, I’m being childish. I’m not the lonely one plying people with liquor to get laid,  _ angel _ .” He made a point of knocking back his glass in one swallow. “At least treat me to dinner.”

“That’s—you’re so vulgar, I—you—” Aziraphale’s face crumpled, suddenly too soft and insufficient to hold the torrent at bay. “I’ve missed you terribly.”

“Have you?” Crowley’s lip curled. “You don’t show it.”

“I—I don’t know what you mean—”

(Crowley wondered, sometimes, whether the stammer was psychological or neurological. Whether there was some sort of… effect… to Beholding Heaven’s servants through a mortal vessel. He’d never felt comfortable asking, but the liquor surely made it worse either way.)

“You blew me off, angel. And don’t pretend you don’t understand the phrase, because it’s not funny right now.” Crowley told himself to stay strong, that he was the injured party here. He could have challenged a man to a duel, once, for this level of casual  _ disrespect _ , but at the end of a very long decade he was weak.

And Aziraphale was going in for more of that liquid courage, as though his own wasn’t enough, before looking back up with something hard and mean sitting behind his eyes. Something wounded in his determination.

“I told you. I said—we could spend time together. Dinner. But you didn’t want that, so. If this is all. I… please stay.”

It wasn’t a request, not really.

It had been too long since Crowley’d felt that strong grip on the back of his neck, drawing him down those few crucial inches to crush their mouths together. Too long since he’d done what his tongue did best besides sowing damnation, knocked the knees out of Aziraphale with a little swirl and had him collapsing onto the coffee table. (Maybe those were the same thing.)

This was bad. This was so, so bad, and not in the good way, because he was a demon and he could taste desperation and didn’t know which of them stank of it so horribly.

Not when they were so close. 

He broke the kiss, though they were still wrapped around one another too tightly, and stared down into Aziraphale’s dazed and resolute face. It wasn’t right for Aziraphale to look like  _ that _ during  _ this. _

“You really missed me?” he asked, hating how vulnerable it sounded against the walls he could see there, ice-blue. He didn’t know why or when they’d gone up and changed everything.

“I—I did. I didn’t realize that you wouldn’t want—”

A crack was forming, and if he were any kind of a real demon he’d use that: pry it wide and painful and shove himself inside to do more damage. Batter them both to pieces on these rocks. Instead, he shook his head and shifted his weight, boots on the floor.

“We shouldn’t do this. Not when you’re like this.”

“Crowley!”

“No!” He’d long accepted that it wasn’t in his nature to deny Aziraphale anything. Whether that space in his heart had been weathered away by a slow trickle of fondness or encoded into his essence long before the first unwitting spark had been struck on that wall, it was the same in the end: that pulling away, really drawing away not for an idle spat but as the sun in his personal orbit stared helplessly up at him, was killing him. He did up his buttons, fingers deceptively calm, and resettled his shades. Armor back in place, he could finally speak again. “I’ll call you Sunday next. We’ll get lunch.” 

It should be alright now, he told himself. He’d do it better now, and it would be what Aziraphale wanted, and it wouldn’t look like this. This nauseous, dizzy feeling that was next door to love and catty-corner to alcohol poisoning. 

He drove drunk out to the edge of the city and forced the liquor out of his system in the old-fashioned human way, groaning as the forcible heaves untucked the symmetrical bangs on either side of his face. He indulged in being sweaty, sick and filmy with grime there in the dark for a few minutes.  _ This is Hell, might as well feel like it _ . 

Across town, the owner of a reservation at the Ritz happened to fall grievously ill and found himself unable to stomach the idea of eating in a restaurant for the foreseeable future. Crowley, meanwhile, slithered home to leak a few more rumors about the upcoming crisis in how computers marked time. It hadn’t been very hard to convince the programmers that the two-digit year format was a good idea. 

Here was the secret: Not one of them could imagine something they built lasting more than a hundred years.

Smart bastards.

  
  


**_2019 AD (Give or take temporality as a whole)_ **

_ It should have been fun. _

_ That thought tugged uncomfortably at the back of Crowley’s thoughts when he was bagged and tagged and dragged up top like the criminal he was. _

_ Up Top looked different now, and not just because Crowley was different. It looked like the dratted Apple Store, irony of ironies, and he had to glance down at “himself” to confirm just how poorly the tweed and antiquity matched the gleaming white spaces. _

_ It was quiet. Private, even, and that meant he could say whatever he wanted, shock and offend and take his petty revenge except— _

_ Except that it wasn’t _ his  _ death. Crowley wasn’t the one who would be labelled a coward and a fool, if he fought. He twisted the gold ring around his pinky finger and curled his toes inside the shoes, feeling a small hole starting in the woolen sock held up by garters, and still his courage almost failed when the fire came. _

_ Not for him; you couldn’t fool the elements, and its warmth and roar called something deep within his chest. _

_ But this face, this face and this body— _

_ He had to push, to put them there in the midst of it, and he hoped that it would be some kind of catharsis for his worst nightmare. _

It should have been fun,  _ he thought as he watched the soft hands with the gold ring refuse to burn. _

  
  


**Spring 1816 AD**

“Open up! Name of the king!” Crowley rapped hard on the newly-painted door of Aziraphale’s shop, puffing his chest up so that the shining buttons on the jacket glittered in the sun. He waited five long minutes before realizing his error. Aziraphale didn’t spook, not with human authorities. At the moment, a normal human would find themselves considering all the other very important things they had to do.

So instead, he tried something they didn’t do. “It’s me.”

A sudden bustling lit up the room within, and the door clicked open at the hand of its new proprietor. They were lovely hands. One’s chin fit just right in the soft palm, and the thumb brushed perfectly along the roadmap of a cheekbone. Crowley’s heart squeezed and flipped over. 

“Here.” He held up his small white offering, carefully folded to protect the delicate pastries inside. “Opened up down the road. Thought you could tell me everything that’s wrong with it, help me sow some doubt.”

“You’re dreadful.” Aziraphale scowled as he stepped aside to let the demon in.

“What did it take on the last one, six months?” He teased. The building still stood empty, a testament to Aziraphale’s scathing review.

“It is not a sin to encourage humans to strive to be their best selves.” The door locked behind them as clocks across the city struck three. “You would’ve agreed with me if you hadn’t been afraid to put that chantilly cream in your mouth.” 

Rather’ve put something else in my mouth, Crowley didn’t say, because he was tacky but not tasteless. (Tastelessness wouldn’t get him what he wanted).

Because it was early afternoon, and they hadn’t had a drop to drink.

“I’m afraid I’ve always preferred Chantilly lace,” he said instead. “Shame it’s out of fashion at the moment.”

“Is it?” Aziraphale blinked, eyes flitting over Crowley’s cuffs as though seeking the years-gone black froth. The deaths of the lacemakers had been a secondary concern to simply getting him out of there intact, after all.

“For this set, yes. Now, were I a Spanish lady…” Crowley let the sentence dangle, going nowhere in particular and wondering just where his angel would steer it.

“I needn’t aid your vanity by telling you it would suit you impeccably, old serpent.” The angel sniffed a bit more literally than usual; a cunning little silver box squirreled itself away into his pocket, trying too late to hide the newest human vice he’d picked up.

“But you think so,” he needled, put on an exaggerated air of smugness to hide the real pleasure it gave him. “Taking up new hobbies without me?”

“Demons thrive on secrecy, I’m told. I was only attempting to oblige.” 

“They love finding secrets.” He crossed into the room, fingers stealing into that finely embroidered pouch and tracing the filigreed square inside. The barest scent of lavender and tobacco hung between them as he dropped a slip of paper from his hand and withdrew the box instead. “The nastier the better.” 

Snuff did next to nothing for him, the way he was built. The tingle of nicotine went to his brain, buzzing but colorless; he tried dabbing a bit on his tongue and made a face, coughing as if his lungs might give out. From the corner of his eye, he watched Aziraphale read.

“You’re impossible.” The angel fussed over him with a small handkerchief, something cream tucked in amid the white and yellow stitching as he dabbed at Crowley’s eyes. “Do you really think?” 

“That I cut a sensational figure in lace? Naturally.” Honestly, what was the point in writing things down if Aziraphale was going to bring them up? “Summer’s looking a bit on the bleak side. Might want to stay in.” 

“You could stop acting as though I light off cross-country at the drop of a hat.” Aziraphale was best when slightly angry, even if it was at Crowley’s expense. There was the brief heat to his cheeks, and then the narrowing of those clever eyes, thinking of how to make you sorry for the misfortune about to come your way.

“Your timing could be worse. Still haven’t figured out how.” He leaned against the door. “Look, I’m just saying be careful. Politics haven’t been this nasty since Rome. Take my gig, go play with those writers up at the lake. Byron’s easy, barely needs tempted at all.”

“Switzerland, my dear, really? You know I’m rubbish at French.”

“Haven’t the tongue for it?” Crowley didn’t flick his own, because he didn’t need to. He did know Aziraphale had no French, a horrid reminder not thirty years distant; that had always seemed bitterly wrong. God had wrenched easy speech from the occult and the ethereal just as much as the humans who built the damned tower.

(He didn’t need to flick his tongue because it was easy, so easy like this, this language that they both spoke.)

“The Swiss are masters of chocolate, you know.” He put a hand on Aziraphale’s, mightily daring, and leaned in. “You could easily stop by a shop, whilst in the neighborhood.”

Aziraphale’s lips parted involuntarily, and Crowley just wanted to lean in and claim them, but the unseasonable chill crept up the back of his neck (exposed by his irritatingly short frightened owl haircut) and he shivered back, instead.

“You’re cold!”

And even as Crowley pulled away, so Aziraphale followed as on a string.

“S’nothing. Just my blood.” He peeked over the top of his glasses, wrinkling his brow just so, and sure enough Aziraphale chafed his knuckles and folded him into a gleaming new armchair.

“It’s a good thing they didn’t decide to reassign me,” Aziraphale scolded as he wrapped a snowy bit of tatted lace around Crowley’s shoulders and pressed a steaming cup into his hands. Not just tea, his tongue informed him. Brandy. 

“Jussst a precaution.” Knots that had long since become silent partners in his daily existence began to unwind themselves. “Any other demon’d combust the first time you brandished a fluffy robe at them. Got constant vigilance, me.” 

Aziraphale hmmed, settling into a matching chair just over an arm’s length away. The steam from their cups bridged the silence, always comfortably full and fresh. It was too easy, Crowley reflected as warmth settled in his belly, to let time slip by in here. It was already going to twilight outside. 

“We should…” he gestured at the doors just out of sight. 

“Oh, it’s alright. I’ve been closed for hours.” 

“That.” So many of their clandestine little meetings had happened in taverns and parties, measured by the movements of humans around them. At best, they met in rooms Crowley happened to own, stripped of any indication of his presence unless it was convenient for tempting. This place couldn’t have more perfectly screamed ‘Aziraphale’ if every surface were wrapped in tartan; and they needn’t play pretend for a human audience. He nodded slowly, feeling his skin grow ever-so-lax. “Thassss good.” 

The spirits weren’t strong enough, nor the tea hot enough, to excuse the warmth lodged higher by far than his belly. It was a tiny ache, unnamed and unnameable, but he’d known what it was for what might as well be forever. It was just so— _ much, _ seeing Aziraphale in private. Always had been, since he first invited Crowley way back in Rome, then woke up full of regrets. Overwhelming, somehow, to see him do all the little rituals humans used to create comfort and pleasure and survival.

The holy heat of soft palms wrapping around his cold bony left hand and chafing the knuckles was not unbearable—just barely.

(They didn’t say it, even though it bubbled and simmered like soon-to-be-tea on the hob, because Aziraphale was smarter than Crowley had ever been. Thinking a question hadn’t been enough to send him hurtling; the  _ words _ of occult beings held power over themselves most of all.)

(On his better days, Crowley didn’t resent it, and maybe that made him less evil than he ought to be.)

“Aziraph—”

“Switzerland,” Aziraphale interrupted him, so ill at ease with chatter but more so with silence. “Will be colder than this, I wager.”

“Do you?” Crowley felt his lip draw up, lopsided and fond, and he sipped with his free hand to hide it. Steam didn’t dare gather on his spectacles. “Sin, to play the odds—and dangerous, too.”

“Do be serious.” Blue eyes rolled as their owner took an imprudent drink himself, almost choking on the floating slice of lemon. “Mmf. You’re really suggesting that I somehow tempt and inspire the same group of young people at the same time? It would never work.”

“Sure it would. You knew the one girl’s mother. The smart one, with the Vindication. Thingy.”

“Did I?” The mathematics of the angels were so far beyond the mundane work of calculating human lifespans that it took a moment for Aziraphale to scale down, his brow furrowing with the effort of subtracting to arrive at 18. “It’s been that long?”

“That’s the danger of keeping your nose in books. They’ve got a tendency to die, humans.” 

“Poor thing,” Aziraphale frowned, as if he’d heard someone forget their umbrella. “She was so very young.”

“The daughter?” 

“The mother. I hope she and her gentleman friend were all right. She was so distraught over all that wretched business in France. And she never did write…” he looked most put out at that, dragon of letters that he was. 

“Think I might have one of hers laying around,” Crowley mused aloud. He’d thrown off skirts for the last few decades—his flair for extravagance at last coming to blows with his desire to get through a bloody door—but he’d spent a time or two in the right circles of conversation. “Shame it didn’t do much. Trouble with being topical. They were all ready to sweep that nasty revolution business under the rug.”

“You—” Aziraphale was excellent at controlling the greedy bulge of his eyeballs, but snakes had an eye for such things. 

“Ah, s’old anyway. Could be I just threw it out.” 

“You wouldn’t dare.” The angel said it with such confidence that Crowley began to doubt his own skills. But just at the end there, there was that uncertain quiver. “They never did a second printing.” 

“If I wasn’t in Switzerland, I’d have more time to look.” 

“Bribery, really?” Aziraphale tossed back his weak toddy and when he looked at Crowley his face was unwontedly serious. “If I didn’t know better, I’d think—”

Think what? That this whole thing is an excuse? He bit his tongue. “Dangerous stuff, thinking. Could get you in trouble with the wrong sort.”

Aziraphale’s hand on his arm was careless in its deliberateness. “I know a thing or two about helping those who’ve found themselves in trouble,” he confided. It was difficult to square the plump, rosy being beside him with the sort of iron spine needed to ensure the protection of the vulnerable and their secrets. That was, of course, the trick of it. 

Bastard. It lit coals in his belly to think Aziraphale would outlast all of them, sly as he was and still on the ramparts. Thinking on it too long doused them out again. “Fortunately, only an idiot would trust an angel.” 

“And only a fool would listen to a demon.” Their faces were a very ungentlemanly span apart. Neither moved to breach that small detente; the luxury of their mingled, superfluous breath was so much smaller than the little handfuls they’d taken over the centuries. But to be sitting so close in broad daylight, both content to be happy and not just furtively intent, was the more dangerous act by far.

“You need to clean your windows,” Crowley said, too softly, marveling at the paleness of his eyes in the midst of bruise-dark humanlike shadows. “Fifteen years of fog, and nobody’s able to see inside to your wares.”

“I suppose you’ll be telling me to have my chimney swept as well?” Aziraphale’s lips quirked, ever-nervous voice almost relaxed, almost playful. “As though you keep a real household.”

“S’ a firetrap.”  _ I’d hate to see you burn, _ he wasn’t stupid enough to say. Wishing for the Enemy to keep his privileges, his ignorance—

“It’s not Alexandria, dear. It’s mine; perfectly safe. Are you feeling well today?”

Crowley shook his head, not sure where the agitation was coming from and searching for a way back onto more usual ground. “Think it’s just the weather,” he said by way of redirection.

Aziraphale’s face went serious again, unfortunately, but on the bright side he sat down as well, sharing the nearly-new couch without hesitation.

“Indeed. I—I do wonder whether—” That lovely, light gaze flicked away, focusing on the dirty glass and the grey lowering sky beyond. “That is to say.”

To say nothing, because Aziraphale had never met an important statement he wouldn’t rather leave unspoken.

“Whether or weather?”

“What?”

“What? You said you wondered—”

“About the signs!” Aziraphale hissed, dispensing with archness in a flurry of distress. “Surely you’ve been out there these last few years. Air like soup, those poor humans getting sicker—it all looks a bit like his work, don’t you think?” 

“Your side hasn’t said anything?” 

“They’re very busy, of course.” The bluster came like clockwork. “There’s a proper order to things, heralds and—and all that.” He faltered. 

“Suppose they’ve just forgotten where they left you?” They were sitting too close, because Crowley could feel how the angel flinched. Fortunately, he’d trained his irritation to drown out those inconvenient flickers of guilt.

Aziraphale has chosen his drug of choice as well, stiffening prim and proper and only slightly acidic. “Don’t be ridiculous. Michael wouldn’t even allow a garden to bloom out of turn without it being signed in triplicate.”

“And Gabriel’s ass to blow it up.” Aziraphale couldn’t quite hide his snort, and Crowley let the warmth of that sight tug his mouth open. “If it were really the End, I’d have heard about it. First one in, last one out.” 

“Not—” Aziraphale’s lips pursed suddenly, as they always did when he was swallowing some bitter words, and he followed them with a suddenly-present sip of brandy.

Crowley wanted to flick his tongue inside there, taste the hemlock that silences radicalism, but after all this time he wanted to  _ hear _ that dissent more.

“Not what, darling?” He slithered up, onto soft thighs and pale woolen tweed, the heat of heavenly furnaces between his legs and beneath his palms. (His teacup settled itself somewhere safe, afterthought but cared-for still.) “I promise you, I’m devilish clever.”

“Clever isn’t safe,” Aziraphale said it as though the words were being pulled from between his lips, an endless stream of silk scarves with knots catching hard on the canines. “In a war—There’s no telling when you’d be out.”

And then  _ Aziraphale _ wrapped a hand around the back of Crowley’s neck, warmth to block the horrible strange  _ unnatural _ cold, and pulled him into a kiss they weren’t nearly drunk enough for.

It was quick, practically decent for affectionate Boston-married friends sitting chastely in their shared parlor somewhere. But intent, as well their kind knew, mattered, and there was an unspoken hunching of shoulders when they parted. “Can’t be rid of me that easy,” Crowley said. “You owe me.”

Aziraphale’s soft features had set into steady determination in the seconds Crowley’s eyes had closed, an alchemic change he never tired of seeing. In his raving moments, it sometimes convinced them they might actually stand a chance if the End, the real one, ever really came. “I assume you’ve already thought of how you’ll pay me back for this.”

“Did I mention the chocolate?” He laughed as Aziraphale dumped him to the ground, the unspoken  _ why didn’t you say so _ on the air. As usual, Crowley didn’t answer. What did they have between them, after all, if not temptation? 

“You aren’t nearly so suave as you’ve convinced yourself,” Aziraphale informed him, offering a hand after what seemed to be a pitched inner battle. 

Such challenges couldn’t be stood for in Hell, where a posturing strut was the only way to walk; more than that, pettiness was a particular tool of Crowley’s trade. It was only partly why, halfway to hauling himself up, he grasped that outstretched hand and pulled. “You sure about that?” He wheezed from the bottom of their confluence of limbs.

“You’re lucky I didn’t get tea on this waistcoat.” Aziraphale seemed nonplussed by all the meetings of their too too solid flesh, not sinking in nor scrambling for decorum. It was infuriating. “The embroidery is very fine.”

“Huh. Wait—” Crowley ran his fingers along the fabric, feeling the infinitesimally raised patterns. Beneath that was the finely woven shirt, simple enough to hide the hours of detail and the delicacy of the cloth. And beneath that, at last, warm flesh. There was fine work there too, veins and pink marks commemorating meals well-enjoyed. Crowley could trace them all, even half-hidden. “Think I’m seeing it now.”

“You’re—” The scolding was broken by laughter. And then, miracle of miracles, those soft hands grasped his and guided them to the small of Aziraphale’s back. “....utterly hopeless, my dear.” 

“Hope is your department, darling, not mine.” Crowley smothered any hint of protest with a kiss and slid a hand up to unbutton the fall of what  _ had _ to be the same breeches he’d seen in France twenty years past, now significantly less fashionable but just as well-fitted. “What exsssactly are you hoping for today?”

His hand hovered, not making that reach, and Aziraphale took the beat of the moment to down a fuller-than-before glass of brandy in a single gulp, amber drops hanging on his lips until his tongue darted out and robbed Crowley of the chance to tidy it.

“I hadn’t any plans. And anyway, this would certainly upset them, if I had.”

How dare he, really, look so lovely and warm when the spring air itself refused to nurture anything. How dare he welcome Crowley in like this and then play the coquette—

Wonderful. Crowley would miss him dearly while he was off in fucking Switzerland.

“You’ve got old-fangled, new-fashioned, the ever-popular Shakespearan shag—”

“I wasn’t _ serious  _ about the dictionary, Crowley.” 

“‘To lay Cain upon Abel,’ I liked that one.” He grinned ear to ear, running a finger suggestively up the stiffness between his legs. “Trust humans to lay the sacred and the profane all cozy just ‘cause they’ve been told not to.” 

“How do you find time to do your wicked work with such a wagging tongue?” 

“Not all it—ghn!” He was only halfway through a suggestive flourish when a deceptively powerful hand closed around him, pulling him close and squeezing his cock against Aziraphale’s newly matched set. Crowley crawled, fumbled for the abandoned bottle of brandy and killed it, embarrassed by his own sensitivity. 

“It’s a shame that lace is out of fashion,” Aziraphale said in a voice that so clearly meant trouble, “But I must confess, these buckskins of yours have their compensations.”

A firm hand on his buttock through soft, tight, imagined leather; Crowley was only a demon. It would have been frankly inhumane to ask him to maintain any kind of dignity.

“Not buckskins,” he hissed softly, looking over the rims of his spectacles in what he knew to be clear provocation, “Ssssnakeskins.”

The convulsive tightening of his angel’s grip was a win, if ever he’d had one. Heavenly blue irises contracted, swallowed up by black, and then Aziraphale was  _ on  _ him. Jacob had wrestled with his angel no less ferociously but lost far less deliciously. Crowley rutted his hips against the solid weight above him, thrashing with the confidence of one who knew he’d never escape. 

“It’s quiet without you here,” Aziraphale said, halfway through removing and folding (with agonizing, deliberate precision that slowed each time Crowley squirmed) his shirtsleeves. “The days become rather predictable.” 

“Saying you miss me?” He put a sneer on it

A splash of brandy escaped Aziraphale’s refilled glass; he chased it down the hollow of Crowley’s ribs, drowning out the deafening silence with harsh breathing. 

“Here—” they rolled again, the bottle Crowley had been reaching for miraculously unbroken, and for a moment they lay side by side, passing the brandy off between them until they were both snickering at nothing. 

“Don’t spend all winter in Switzerland.” He moved his hand in slow, lazy strokes, relishing the war between alcohol and desire on Aziraphale’s face. “Bloody cold, Switzerland. They’ll ship you back in an ice block. No amount of cocoa will stop that.” 

“S’not winter, though, izzit?” Aziraphale’s brow had lines like nothing in Heaven, at least by Crowley’s memory. “Summer, soon. And still cold.”

“Summer, then. But still.” He buried his face in softness, uncomfortable suddenly with how close he was coming to saying what he shouldn’t.  _ Never _ tell the truth aloud; hadn’t he learnt that all the way back before the Beginning?

The hand on his bare shoulder was soft, too, and too gentle by far.

“It’s not as though I’ve even agreed yet to go. I could—stay here, if things are bad. If it’s looking like the End, a few more souls shouldn’t matter.”

“Calling me a liar? I told you it’s  _ not _ the End, angel, and you owe me enough to book a damned carriage.”

“M’not sure I do, at that.” Cool as a cucumber, or the air creeping in under the doorjamb, and thank Somebody for him punting things back where they were easy and worn-in and safe.

“You will,” Crowley said, and swung a leg over.

* * *

[7] Common proverbs regarding the Devil aside, Hell proper quite preferred that its agent on Earth be able to show his hands had been consistently active, pointing rather more to the contradictory saying about rest times and the wicked

[8] He did allow himself to imagine, briefly, a desperate little 607 blinking up at him. 1134 2 09 felt more likely.

[9] Though she’d been called Lady Luck in her day, and a string of other things not long after

[10] Unless of course they were the kind that looked like they had to be pushed but actually needed a pull, or the automatic ones that necessitated standing on a very particular piece of mat. Crowley had invented them all and only occasionally forgot how they worked


	4. Chapter 4

**_2019 AD (If Anywhen)_ **

_ It wasn’t that bad, really. _

_ Being Hell, the place was far from pleasant, but not nearly what Aziraphale had imagined on the occasions when he couldn’t avoid doing so. The walls pressed in and trapped the stink of body odor, and sweat itched his neck and ankles with every step; but it was demons around him. Not the rubble of the Blitz, or the wracked sickly human bodies poisoned in the trenches.  _

Humans are so clever, _ Crowley had slurred in a drunken haze.  _ Did Hell better’n Hell.

You’re so clever. How can someone so clever be so stupid? 

You’re so _ —human. The words ran and jumbled in his head, clattering loud and clear despite the raucous cries of demons all around.  _

_ He had felt so heavy for the past century, in ways he hadn’t even realized until he found himself poised over the clawfoot tub. The relentless, pounding sound and the maddening giddiness mounting in him at his forced swagger brought with it every horror he had tucked away, every doubt that was so much harder to file neatly into the overstuffed folder of Ineffability without Crowley there to voice them. To exorcise them by marking them Damned.  _

_ His foot dangled over the surface, hovered, and then he slid into the water in one fluid motion. As he did there was an explosive cheer and then—then. Silence. Without, and within. All his doubts, all his questions, and the bath was just a bath.  _

_ He could’ve cried. _

  
  


**2019 AD**

For all their bravado, they walked out of the park with knots in their shoulders, a little dizzy from the sudden release from all orders. They turned down their regular paths to their regular haunts, everything still dreamlike; confusing in its sameness. Aziraphale let an original copy of  _ Leaves of Grass _ leave in the arms of a giddy graduate student. Crowley patted a ficus as he strode down the hallway. 

They were waiting, both of them, for God to somehow catch them out like He had in the Garden. Six thousand years would make anyone a creature of habit. Which is why, perhaps, they turned to the thing that had always eased things between them. 

Wine, so different from how it used to taste, changed imperceptibly heaped on for millennia so that only they out of all the world would notice. Quite  _ extraordinary _ amounts.

Neither accounted for what would move to fill the void with their mutual enemy gone. 

“You held me last night, and you’re going cold on me again? Here’s why I should never expect anything from you.”

“I turned you down exactly once, Crowley—”

“Like a bedsheet, yes—”

“—and you punished me for  _ 80 years, _ so forgive me if I’m a little unused—”

“Wait. What?”

“What?”

Crowley held a finger up, attempting to assemble a puzzle from pieces that refused to fit.

“When do you think I punished you, let alone for years? I’ve been nothing but devoted.” He sensed the resentment in his own words, and hoped in vain for it to be arch rather than pathetic.

Aziraphale looked away, jaw clenched and features flinty. It was how he looked when he was being lied to.

Which, Hellishly, Crowley  _ wasn’t doing _ [11].

“Look, just. Pretend I’m an idiot.” (Aziraphale’s lips twitched; bastard, but Crowley had slithered into that one.) “Explain. It’s only been 50 years since you… Ehhh.”

“You know very well. But if you insist on my… Whatever this is…” Aziraphale closed his eyes and inhaled as though preparing to deliver a sermon written long ago. “1862. St. James’ Park. I said no to you, just once, just because it was  _ wrong, _ and you. You.”

Crowley swallowed, mouth suddenly dry.

“You showed me. How much worse it could be without you here.” He laughed, a bitter little dry sound at odds with all he was. “My worst nightmare, right then. So don’t—don’t you dare say I haven’t felt what you did in that fire, and for  _ longer.” _

“You said—” Crowley’s voice was pitifully small, unable to even finish the childish justification. “Look, I had to get away, all right?”

“I see.”  _ From me  _ came loudly unspoken through the purse of Aziraphale’s lips. He was so good at not speaking.

“From all of it!“ Crowley fisted his hands in his hair, too near sober and too perilously happy (should be happy, all signs pointed to it—) for  _ this. _ “You didn’t have to look at it. It wasn’t your fucking job to encourage it, all the nasty little things that crawl out of humans’ brains.”

“Is that why you asked me? For the—“ Azriaphale nodded jerked his head at the place where the stain had been, and Crowley looked away, gaze lighting on too many things—the spot where Aziraphale had knelt, the last time they were physical; the pyramid of empties; a scuffed tan shoe with a hole in the sock that Crowley shouldn’t know from the inside out—before he took an aggressive interest in the floor.

“Insurance, like I said. Against them, or me,” he said. “You’d be fine. Never miss a beat, you.”

Aziraphale’s face twisted again, harder, like a fist curling up inside the skin. Until he took another drink, and the expression washed away with a shudder and gasp.

“What.”

“What?”

“You wanted to say something.” Crowley said, newly aware of just how much he hated watching his angel drink instead of talk.

“Mm-mm.” Lips sealed, like there was some secret more valuable than every Heavenly order he’d spilt like wine over the years.

“Tell me.”

“Tell me, first.” Eyes like the clear blue sky, with the first clouds gathering behind them. “Where—where did you go?”

Crowley flinched.

“Nowhere.” (He wanted Aziraphale to be angry, show divine wrath at that weak answer, but the resigned disappointment that came instead stung.)

“This is not the time for semantics, Crowley.” 

As if they ever had time for anything else. Crowley wasn’t the one who got hung up on being  _ ethereal _ . But he couldn’t say that. Not to the stung tremor in that familiar voice. “I was in my flat. Asleep. It was the only way I could think to get out of it. I mean. Since you.” It felt humiliatingly small, bound up in words like that.  _ Took a nap, did you? Had a bit of a sleepy for a century?  _ He was prepared for Aziraphale to be cutting. He knew what to do with that. They’d fight and they’d drink and they’d kiss like nothing had changed, and it would stave off the terrifying new ground they’d stepped into.

So of course the bastard had to go and cry. 

He looked shocked at it himself, hand coming up quickly to disguise a mortifyingly un-stiff upper lip. The tears came almost haphazardly, not a steady stream but rogue agents escaping through a gate on the brink of collapse.

“Don’t…” he held up a hand, every inch of him seized with utter panic.

“You didn’t see it.” It wasn’t accusatory. It was  _ relieved _ . 

“Didn’t see what? That it bothered you? I’m sorry if—”

“You didn’t see the  _ War.” _

_ What War _ —

  
  


**1914 AD**

There was nothing remarkable about the day; brown smog hung over London as always, washing the sun to a pale, diffuse lamp high above the streets Aziraphale had walked, building-tops hidden from sight.

He knew better than to complain.

(Rather solved itself, even, since he had nobody to complain  _ to _ . He was quite properly alone.)

Still, it seemed unfair. He’d always loved a real pea soup, but the acrid particular that went by that name seemed to steal his very appetite away.

Yet the thought of living here without fires to keep one warm—

The bottom of one foot felt sore; memory, or perhaps just the result of wearing boots broken in some thirty years past? The soles had worn through more than once before now.

When the rain started, miserable and drizzling and probably corrosive as it carried all those nasty chemicals down with it, he raised his brolly in what felt like a moment of choreographed unity with the humans who packed the street beside him. The contrivance popped open like the wings of a great bat, covering him in a shadow. The black colour was perhaps not… entirely what he should own, given all else, but it was wonderfully  _ conservative _ , making him a part of the mass rather than one of two out-of-place white flecks[12]. 

There was hardly time, lately, to think about the great mass around him as anything but another checked box. He was run off his feet. The requests for blessings poured in as humanity spread itself out and out, each subsequent assignment asking him to do more with less. It had perhaps been a mistake to take credit for so many of the fervent little groups that had begun forming in the last decade of the previous century, and continued fragmenting and tightening in the absence of an Apocalypse. It had given Gabriel ideas.

_ Group of misled humans under the thumb of some vainglorious arsehole? Bet he took _ notes. Crowley’s voice was clear and crisp in Aziraphale’s ear, though he hadn’t heard it in years. He had to stop himself from replying out of habit, which only further soured his mood. 

It’s your own fault, he chided himself. For carrying on as though nothing’s changed.

He’d decided quite early on that Crowley couldn’t be dead. It was a ridiculous notion—Hell would’ve sent another agent, and they’d have come to pick some ill-conceived fight with him straight away. Heaven would’ve sent him congratulations, or another medal, another splash of gold that he couldn’t fit to his flesh. But that wasn’t to say his counterpart mightn’t get careless. After years of keeping one another in check by keeping in sight, they might be out of practice at calibrating now that they were… now that their association had gained an additional distance. 

Tomorrow he was for Sarajevo, overland, to create some sort of minor coincidence—and he couldn’t complain, because he’d been given the first step of a task, an important one. But today he wanted a sandwich, and to check the locks on his shop, and to drink; how he wanted a drink.

(He’d aged out of his club, or rather failed to age. And he didn’t drink alone. So instead he would dust and rearrange his bottles, for such time as they were of use again.)

Rain trailed silver from the spokes of the umbrella, carrying the atmospheric filth down to the stones and the gutters. Aziraphale could have gotten a cab, but what was the point, really? Every human near him needed it more.

It chafed, though, to be left to his own devices for a hundred years or near enough, and then summoned and sent off forthwith, as though he’d no plans of his own.

They were little plans, true enough, but he’d promised Maskelyne that he’d help with the nascent Occult Committee’s works, and surely that would have been Good, fostering skepticism and understanding in the face of blatant trickery—

But now he’d best not even try to practice his patter on the trip, because he could sense the stammer hiding in the meat of his tongue. Practice with the razor blades instead; shock Houdini by doing it for real.

When he arrived at his little corner there was a missive waiting for him, creamy and untouched in spite of the downpour and somehow frowning discouragingly despite its nonexistent face. He opened it, just to confirm what he already knew. 

No sandwich.

In fact, there was barely time to make it back across the city if he wanted to use the train ticket that had been pointedly enclosed with his orders. He took a few moments anyway, shaking himself free of water as the damp rose obligingly from his coat and drew safely away from his more fragile volumes.

“Honestly,” he huffed under his breath. “I could’ve been there already if they—if they didn’t insist on being s-so—” 

He bit his tongue. Heaven had its reasons, he reminded himself, and shoved the nagging little thoughts down where they always went. It was cold comfort to the roiling annoyance in his belly, and he felt a pang of loneliness for the first time in several months. Crowley would have prodded him about it, baited him into thoroughly ungracious complaints and then laughed. 

_ It’s lovely to have someone to blame, isn’t it. _ The nauseous regret became overpowering at that moment, and he was halfway through uncorking a bottle with a ‘67 on the fading label before he caught himself. It was bad form, drinking on the job. 

Drinking at all, really, when he didn’t need to.

As it turned out, he did get a sandwich in Sarajevo, and something terrible happened—exactly as planned.

It only mattered when humans did things for themselves, though of course he could give them a push. An opportunity.

A wrong turn.

_ (Heaven’s were freedom fighters, of course. Not that it helped the triggerman, in the end.) _

And in the four years that followed, shells and guns and flu, black markets and red crosses, he finally had to accept that something had happened.

Crowley must be dead, because surely he wouldn’t have just… left Aziraphale alone, in a world of grey mud and yellow gas. In a world that was surely, surely in its death throes, Armageddon unannounced.

  
  


**2019 AD**

“You were tired of the worst of it, I know. I know why, better than you think. And I think that perhaps… Once you were gone…” Aziraphale rubbed his hand over his face. His ring and tear tracks glinted in the soft golden glow that always showed up for him, even in Crowley’s fluorescent-track-lighted flat. “They really didn’t know which of us did what, or what any of it meant. Right or wrong—You were always correct there. Maybe my assignments changed because of that, as much as because of what the humans learned. But that War.” He pursed his mouth, bow stolen from another theology. “I thought, certainly, that you were dead if I didn’t see you there. And when you came back, I thought you must have hated me, to leave me in it alone.”

The cord of six millennia pulled Crowley’s body tight: his throat constricted, to stop up any maudlin decrees that would make him sound like a lovesick sod; his elbows held fast to his sides, to keep his hands from grasping Aziraphale’s shoulders. They didn’t do that, not sensible and sober and no longer looking down the barrel of the end. 

_ Why not?  _

Crowley teetered on the edge of a yawning pit where he’d neatly piled up all the things that scraped themselves sharp on the anxious underbelly of his thoughts. 

_ If he hates me, I’ve got nothing left. And then I might as bloody well take that bath,  _ he thought. And then,  _ Oh. Oh, I see. _

“Ngk,” managed his mouth. 

“I would understand. Of course.” The charade was playing out between them with all the plausibility of a panto. “Change is difficult. Especially with our… history. I want you to know I’m not precisely—proud of the things I said to you. But I’d hoped—” 

It was self-preservation, in the end. He would be swallowed into the earth if he had to go on listening to the light of his existence prattling on about _ somedays _ and  _ maybes _ and _ a bit _ . This was the delirium that made him reach out to take Aziraphale’s face in his hands. It was purely Crowley that he misjudged the tension still stored in his muscles, and squarely clocked their foreheads together instead of their lips. 

“Should I—”

“Let me—”

“Ow!”

He hadn’t been so clumsy in 1500 years, but he hadn’t heard Aziraphale laugh quite that way in all that time, either. Back then, he hadn’t yet had the ability to appreciate it; now, he worried to think they’d gone so far backward.

“You’re a mess, angel,” he said, burrowing his head up into the crook of Aziraphale’s shoulder with abnormal flexibility and deeply average awkwardness. “We’re both—please just let me come home again?”

With eyes closed tight, he sensed the breathless moment, charged with electricity like a cloud about to let loose.

“My dear,” Aziraphale’s hands were on his cheeks, his chin, the column of his throat. “I didn’t think you cared.”

It wasn’t a joke, but Crowley laughed anyway, ugly and raw to match the ache he heard in Aziraphale’s voice. It had been there back when Londinium was new, too.

And because Aziraphale had always been so furtively heroic, he put them both out of their misery.

His mouth was as careful and deliberate as a priest consecrating ground, but the burn Crowley always found himself expecting never came. The warmth in him was soft, encompassing, and it no longer frightened him to death. It was like picking up an old dance, one where they only occasionally stepped on one another’s toes. He shivered at the hand up his back, shrugging his suit jacket back into the void. Aziraphale gave him a sour look when he reached for the angel’s buttons.

“Never gonna let me live out that dream of passionately ripped clothes?”

He was rewarded with a disapproving tsk, and then a voice in his ear. “It could be arranged, I suppose.”

He stilled, looking at his hands (strange, suddenly—ropy and knobby and  _ real _ somehow because they were his instead of Hell’s) on buff velvet and white linen.

“You love this getup.”

“Not—not as—” pink tongue, so much more experienced than Heaven would want, darted out before the mouth firmed: “It can be arranged. For you.”

“But  _ you’ll _ always know.”

“I will.”

Crowley shuddered at the thought, but still just undid the buttons, because—not tonight. Not that far, when so much was already changing and snapping back into place.

“You…” he struggled for words that would fit the reverence of the situation: that they were alone now, as much as if they’d left for Alpha Centauri or Wisconsin; that they would never be alone, because they’d set themselves as two among billions. That no one, finally, would ever truly understand either of them as well as the other. “Bastard,” he said with all the fondness he could muster. 

Aziraphale didn’t mention the shaking, or which of them it might’ve started in. But he held Crowley tighter; it kept either of them from running as Aziraphale whispered against his hair, “I think it would be best if we sobered up.” 

“...Yeah, alright.”

Finding their way to the bed then was a trial greater than hellfire, four knees half-shaking without the the old rails in place; they froze every few inches, each determined to let the other lead, until finally Crowley grasped Aziraphale’s hand and pulled them both down together. 

They lay side by side, reacquainting themselves with one another’s shapes. “It feels as if there should be some grand occasion,” Aziraphale admitted at last. 

“Telling Heaven and Hell to bugger off isn’t impressive enough?” Crowley teased.

“Well,” there was an unmistakable puff of pride in Aziraphale’s chest. “I meant more… it has been a while, hasn’t it. Since we…”

“Feeling commemorative?” He cupped Aziraphale’s cheek. “Shall I order a few lightning strikes? Shake the stars loose? Put on my lacy knickers?”

Aziraphale quirked his eyebrow at the last, with a smile that sent hot spirals down to Crowley’s toes. “I meant more that we. Well, you know. It’s a bit different, like this.” 

“Sober.” 

“Yes.” 

“Are you—”

Crowley rattled out the groan of the truly damned. “If you ask me whether I’m ‘really sure’ I’ll set this bed on fire. I really will.” And then he shuddered at his own terrible, careless words, and looked for distraction to that unsmooth flesh.

Stretch marks and clothing-creases, pink as sunburn and ragged as scars, traced patterns celestial gold might fit on another. He interlaced their fingers, the heel of Aziraphale’s palm to the back of his own wrist, and focused on that sight and the memory of being inside it while fires embraced without scorching.

“Crowley.”

He brought their hands to his own lips, darted his tongue out over perfect nails and cuticles, the hard shape of the ring, and he made it sexy to clamp down on his own foolish fear.

“ _ Crowley.” _

He flinched, just barely, but when he tried to pull away Aziraphale kept their fingers laced tight.

“It’s all right.”  _ Be not afraid _ . “It’s only me.” 

“Not like I’d be doing this for anyone else.” He’d tried, back when he was out to prove Aziraphale was nothing special. He’d proved something, anyway. 

“Oh, my dear.” Aziraphale kissed his eyelids, his forehead, his white knuckles. “We’re terrible fools, aren’t we?” 

And that, of all things, set him off laughing until his cheeks were wet and his throat was raw. Aziraphale gathered him close, skin to skin.

“There was a moment, with the bath,” Aziraphale said at last, “where I thought I might be done for.”

“What, because you had my skin?”

“Because I have  _ my _ past. I wasn’t sure whether I was still… ”

“Ridiculous.” Crowley felt the shrug, and burrowed closer in response. “If misbehaving were all it took, they wouldn’t have been able to carry the stuff, would they?”

“I suppose. But it feels different, knowing for sure.”

(Crowley could have said a lot about how Falling was always painfully, violently sure, but on the other hand, what did he know? Pools of sulphur aside, Aziraphale was no creature of Heaven’s any more.)

“There are more things on Earth, Horatio.”

“You forgot Heaven, love.”

“No I didn’t. There’s just nothing there.”

Outside the nighttime traffic rumbled by, oblivious to what had almost been and to the history playing out inside.

“Why’d we do it, all the way back then?” Crowley propped himself up on his elbow, eyes terribly naked without his glasses. 

Aziraphale seemed to consider it for the first time. “It was your job, I suppose. Temptation and all that business.” 

“Any two-bit demon can use lust. I was an artist. And it was never that with you, anyway.” 

“What was it, then?”

“I used to catch you enjoying yourself.” Crowley moved suddenly, pressing worshipful kisses to his angel’s belly and thighs. “Really doing it, when you thought nobody was watching. It was like finally getting to see what all this was really  _ for _ .”

“I wasn’t supposed to.” Soft, hands tangled with Crowley’s short hair, short as Aziraphale’s had been for so long, and it felt too close to the skin. “It wasn’t made for us.”

“It’s ours as much as anyone’s, now.” The hidden crease at the back of the knee was tender, smelling faintly of sandalwood soap and sweat; the ankle had been well-turned since back when that was a serious consideration. “Let me come home?” he asked again, so softly, cowering in fear of the answer.

“I—oh, love.” The sound Aziraphale made was human, the shudder as he manifested  _ details _ incredible. “Oh, do.”

Crowley didn’t owe him, not really; there was no way to count what they’d been to one another for so long. But still, he gave it his best try.

And after

“It’s funny,” Aziraphale said, rolling onto his belly and taking with him a considerable quantity of Crowley’s thousand-count Egyptian cotton sheets.

He didn’t continue, so of course Crowley had no choice but to pursue his enemy, sliding up onto the angel’s soft back and tickling an ear with the not-quite-forked tip of his tongue.

“What’ssss funny, darling?”

Aziraphale squirmed deliciously, shifting his weight in a lazy way that said that if he wanted to, he could easily throw Crowley off him.

That  _ if _ made all the difference, though.

“Mm. It’s just—you said you wanted to come home.”

Crowley had, at times, a very realistic heart, and he commanded it sternly to stop pounding so hard. Like most hearts, it didn’t listen, so he spoke through the noise in his ears.

“I did, at that. Am I forgiven?”

“For what that’s worth from me, yes, of course.” Aziraphale did move then, his effortless strength carrying Crowley down into the nest of sheets and feathers and his longtime foe’s arms. “But it’s funny—you moved here first. It’s not as though it’s my city alone.”

“Don’t make me get poetic.” He stretched, scales and skin luxuriating in the comfort of being held, at long last, for as long as he wanted. “S’not my forte.”

“Neither is modesty, my dear.” The attack that followed was unhurried but relentless, plainly prepared to transform him inch by inch into goo until he relented.

He waited, nonetheless, a little longer to get on with it. “How many places have we lived, since all this got started?” 

“Thousands,” Aziraphale mused. “Or one, I suppose, depending on how one thinks about it.”

“My point.” It was comforting, somehow, to know they were this way even without an ocean of fermentation loosening their tongues. “The flat’s nice, but it’s a room. I can get one of them anywhere I like.” 

Always too clever by half, Aziraphale laughed. It rumbled in his chest, a storm against Crowley’s ear. “You sly charmer.” The fondness of it was enough to do him in. 

“That’ssssss me,” Crowley hissed low in his throat. “Tempting you to wickednesssss.”

It was the oldest, easiest dodge of depth, and plainly Aziraphale wasn’t in the mood to let him take it this time, because:

“To seriousness, more like. It had never occurred to me, before seeing your room, that our kind could simply—settle down. In a place. With someone.” His round features were grave, and it must just be the lack of glasses that had Crowley so dazzled.

“You didn’t want to,” he heard himself say, huskily, and he’d never been one to beg except in the most exciting of circumstances but how he longed to be told—

“Yes I did. Very much so. And I,” (to hear an angelic voice tremble was surely some sort of curse or blessing), “I needed it. I was so tired. I just had to wear myself out before I could stop running.”

“And then I set you off again, did I?”

“It was you who ran, love. And where I thought I could not follow.”

Molasses-sticky guilt delayed Crowley’s reaction. Demons were not, as a rule, any more honest than angels. But the lies they sowed and the comforts the sewed for themselves were oppositional. “I really thought about going off without you.” It was a struggle not to look away, or to hide himself in comforting softness. “Couldn’t do it.” 

“Any more than I could side with Heaven, in the end.” Aziraphale’s voice was still brittle around the words. 

“Lucky for us they had this little experiment, eh?” His hand froze part way to tracing those familiar features, and Aziraphale’s touch brought him in the rest of the way. 

“It did rather help in...getting on with it, shall we say,” Aziraphale grinned. “Rather excellent advice, actually.” 

The hard squeeze on his thigh was difficult to ignore, but Crowley was a glutton for punishment. “Look, you know I...demons don’t say ‘sorry,’ alright, but that doesn’t mean you don’t deserve—” 

“I knew you were sorry the moment you arrived at that airfield.” 

“But the other times.” If this was a last temptation, he was beginning to see why everyone had been so impressed with that nice boy from Nazareth. 

“You can buy lunch,” Aziraphale whispered between kisses. “For every day you left.”

Tomorrow, they would toast at the Ritz.

Or perhaps the day after. They had all the time in the world.

* * *

[11] This time

[12] He had not yet been formally introduced to Pollution, but they would be nodding acquaintances soon enough


End file.
